Thursday, March 22, 2012

Week update

This week finishing up with the arch pieces on the ends, trimming the slats across the top and putting wires in to strap the Rose shoots onto. I did some of the carving on site.









I got the scaffolding off the site today, so here are some pictures of the structure without that. There is one old bamboo pole in the center that is a leftover from the tripod hat held up the Rose before.











Saturday, March 17, 2012

Progress

At last a good spell of fine weather. I finished up on joinery and transported the timber to the site in batches. Had help from both the offspring over three days.



The set up for work was very temporary, but it was all I needed to get it done. The one point I should have confirmed was to put a Mark on the trunk at a fixed height below the top of the curve to measure from and find the cut off length on site.



On the first day I took half the timber and a lot of scaffolding poles. It took most of the morning to load up. We made a triangulated pole to hitch the chain block to and hauled the collapsed rose bush off of the site out of the way. In the afternoon we made a space frame around the area and set up the chain block to haul timbers into place. The photo above was taken on the second day once the two sides had been erected. Sadly I forgot my camera as usual.



On the third day I worked with sammy to fit four pillars on the ends of the walkway. We also took most of the remaining timber to the site. Each pillar sits on a rock with a metal pin in it to stop it sliding off or bouncing off in a quake. The tops were cut in various ways to mate with the beam. This pillar had a fork that happened to be at the right height, so I just trimmed it a little to allow the beam to sit in there.The next job will be to add the timber across the top of the curved beams and put in some diagonal struts to hold the two sides stable. I think I can manage that on my own if no help is on hand.


Saturday, March 03, 2012

Rose archway





Currently working on several things at the same time. This is the largest. The two bow shaped beams (4m long) will form the top side of a walkway that will have roses trained over it. There are lots of extraneous bit of timber here to support and act as guides for marking out joints. The central y shaped pillar is one side of a trunk that I cut down through the center. The other half will be jointed onto the other bow shaped piece and there will be four more pillars on the ends of the walkway as in the sketch below.