~o~
Monday 30th 54F/12C[7.00] Bright sunshine. With four more days promised. Peaking at 31C on Wednesday. The wind had dropped. Making it feel much warmer. After an unusually windy June.
Up at 6.30 after a night of weird dreams.
I keep running away from various projects. The carport has not progressed. Having completed the construction of the carport roof I needed to move it aside to dig the foundations. Of course it proved far too heavy to move when working alone.
I had various ideas of using inverted rollers from the observatory. This would require that I lift the carport roof far enough to slide the rollers under. Though it would require some sort of timber frame for stability. I have a farmer's high lift jack. Which I used to remove the 24 concrete foundation blocks. That will do it.
My "clever" idea was to use some of these blocks for the carport. It seemed logical. However, the single top fixing screw does not match the square base of the carport feet. A simple square plate, with a central hole would adapt them together quite easily. Finding a strong, square plate eludes me. It would have to be a minimum of 18cm square. With holes on the corners of a 13cm square. I can probably do the drilling.
Then I have to ask: Would a single foundation block per carport foot meet the anchoring requirements? I could use two blocks per foot. With a rectangular plate joining the two. Easy! Except that I have no suitable plates. Preferably in galvanized steel. Wood won't do. It will rot so close to the ground. Use pressure treated? Hmm. It would have to be thick enough but might still have a fairly short life from rain splashes.
Anything borrowed from my heap of scrap aluminium. Intended for telescope and observatory building. Might suffer galvanic corrosion in contact with zinc. It is a variable, but the risk can be much reduced with isolating [spacer] washers. Do I have any suitable aluminum strip 18cm wide? I don't think so. I have 10mm thick strip but it is only 15cm wide. [From distant memory.]
I can see a strip buried in the stack but it needs to be dragged out. Before I can measure its width. I cut some of it narrower for my huge telescope mounting. The 10mm strip proved to be long but only 15cm wide. The fixing holes for the carport feet would barely fall within the edges. I am not aware of any readily available products which would match my needs. If only by coincidence. So I'll have to keep searching for a solution.
A bit of searching online produced several businesses offering 6mm steel plate cut to order. 6 x 175 x 175mm = 151kr per piece in ordinary steel. [About £17 GB] Five times higher price for stainless steel. I'd have to drill five, rather large holes in each. One company offers drilling to order. I have sent them a sketch to get their price for such work.
7.45 Time to walk [not run] away from these problems. I am getting slight cramp in my legs. Which is very unusual for me. A walk will probably fix that.
8.30 60F/15.6C Back from my walk to the lanes. Bright sunshine but the wind was was stronger than promised. Lots of warblers in the hedgerows and trees. A black kite [?] and a red kite were soaring low over the fields. A series of huge, farm tractors went past. Each towing an earth moving trailer.
Perhaps they are contracted to the gas pipeline. Or even the new, high speed, railway route. Though that is further away. There is a lot of field leveling going on. Thanks to all the "waste" soil available from these huge projects. There is also the district heating expansion between various villages. The excavated soil all has to be disposed of. There have been news headlines in Denmark. When mountains of soil were stacked on farmland. To the consternation of neighbours.
12.30 Back from the shops. In time for lunch.
~o~
No comments:
Post a Comment