Winter Activity Day

After finishing the Mock exams some students from year 13, namely Vinit, Stefan, Shaun, Gregory and Mark have decided to make the Winter activity day possible. Stefan has created a plan which was submitted to our CAS coordinator Mr.Gray. It has been decided that this event will take place allegedly on the 8th of February. We decided that because of a lack of "workforce" it would be smart to delegate some of the tasks to the year 12 students, as they are quite a large group and we hope that they will be able to creatively come up with a few ideas for inside activities, where as the year 13 students will be running activities outside. Outside will take place the following activities: Obstacle course on the volleyball field, fotball in deep snow, snow painting/sculpture building and perhaps hockey. Inside will be held quizes and other winter related activities. Perhaps the year 10/11 students will be taken out for a hike in Bitsevsky park. I am personally taking an active part in building the obstacle course. The entire even will help me try something new, as I have never before planned a project myself. By following the plan I will try to execute it with the help of my classmates and I hope our main aim to entertain the younger kids will successfully be fulfilled. We will be working at preparing everything and I will update the blog when I feel that a fair bit of progress has been made.

School Gym

Every two or three days I go to the school gym. I have read a lot about proteins and nutrition and have understood that bench press exercises alone without protein are useless. Therefore I have devised a plan to train different muscle groups every day, which is more efficient and will not require me consuming any protein. My aim is to now follow the plan and gain 2-3 kilos of muscle until march with the help
of ordinary food.

Weather Club

Since October we have resembled taking readings for the production of the end of year graph. The amount of people participating has fallen and it turns out that there are 3-4 pairs left that go out once or twice every break time and take reading in the cold. At the moment our main flaw is that the reading cannot be taken during weekends, hence every monday the readings are inaccurate, but perhaps we could be using readings of a weather forecast website in order to fill in the gaps. Our aim will be to maintain consistency and try to compare data with previous years in order to at least attempt to make judgements about the issue of global warming.

Fuel Filter

So, on the past long weekend my driver and me have bought and changed the fuel filter. It was spoilt because of the bad quality diesel sold on Russian petrol pumps. Last week the temperature fell below zero and this resulted in a condensate forming in the fuel tank. Water reached the fuel filter and the car was displaying an error continuously on the computer screen. The challenge was to locate and understand which one of the two filters was affected. It could have been the one under the hood or the one which is situated at the exit of the fuel tank. Obviously, as the fuel tank was under the car it would be quite difficult to change the fuel filter there, as we have not got such equpment, which could lift a 2.7 tonne car to a height of 2 metres. So we knew that the system was interconnected but the fuel filter at the exit of the tank is much stronger and  universal and rarely needs replacing and therefore we hoped that be replacing the one under the hood the error on the screen would disappear. Under the hood it was situated under the second fuel pump, which extremely difficult to unscre. We had to borrow an electric scew driver from the electricians to do it, as by ordinary human hands and a spanner it was impossible to do. We changed the filter, which is quite small in size( I expected it to be bigger) and th error disappeared. Again, I have enriched my knowledge of automobile mechanics. Our future plan is to monitor the condition of the car and if something breaks try to fix it without the help of official Toyota workshops, which by the way do not always do the job and just leave the old filter but reset the computer with a special program. The old fuel filter is displayed above. ( a clean one for a landcruiser is supposed to be grey)

Reparing again..

This year in july my fathers car turned three years old and the warranty finished. We travelled to Tver' in summer and a small stone hit the windscreen and formed a crack. Untill october the insurance company was finding a place where we could repair our car and they told us to go to an unofficial Toyota workshop, claiming that it is reliable. After we got our car repaired thei we noticed that thee new winscreen allowed wind to pass through on the top. On day it rained and the water went thriugh, down the "torpedo" and floded the comfort blocks of the car. This resulted in the wipers turning on randomle, headlights not turning off and other electronic issues.Then my driver and I went to the Toyota official workshop and asked how much the repair would cost and they said approximately 92 thousand roubles for three blocks of comfort. We decided that they were lying to us because water could not simply kill the entire brains of the computer, so we decided to fix it ourselves:) We dismantled the entire floor and part under the hood and tried to dry the computers. We used fans. It was an extremely difficult task as the car had lots of protection against ordinary people trying to repair it themselves. We spent about 1.5 hours to dismantle it and then we put the fans on. We managed to expose the steering an put some oil on it so that it works better. The main difficulty was to lovate these computers and finding the right ways of deassembling the car and then putting all the parts back as they were. I have learned alot about how to locate where wires go and how to carefully deassemble car parts and not brake them. Photographs helped to remember where some parts went( but thise were not on my camera, my photos are above) I also understood how to lubricate car parts. Our next step will be replacing the fuel filter which is under the fuel pump. I will update on that as well.

International Day

On the last day of school, 19th October we hosted the International day. Each country was allocated a room and activities were run. However someboody had to organise the GYM for the concert and prepare the dining hall and obviously it was the job for the year 13 students. We organized the stage and some musical equipment as well as the tables and cloth and serving the food to teachers and students. After everybody ate we cleaned the dining hall and enjoyed the concert. Unfortunately this was my last international day at BISM but I hope that we can be more organised and waste less time, while organising the upcoming events.

Gear Changing

Our family has several cars. The oldest one is a Mercedes C200 Kompressor, which was bought in the year 2001 and unfortunately the selector of the automatic gear broke down. When the gear was placed in Reverse the car did not move and when it was placed in Drive the car randomly turned gears on, which in many case resulted in dangerous rev's. So the problem was in the Automatic gear selector, which was to be changed. Me and my driver have bought the selector and changed it. It was very difficult to do this, as the entire front interior had to be removed. We used the C-class construction book to find the places where the panel was fixed in position. This was possible because my driver is a auto-mechanic. This procedure took us about three hours. Now the car works well and we hpe that no more parts will have to be changed in the future 5-6 months at least. The picture o the right shows the old selector.