Of Trees and Dreams (by sarah)

This is the first crop of apples from Mary's apple tree we have in a pot in the garden, I been producing alot from the garden this year but it is frustrating as it is all pots and grow bags and we are still waiting for an allotment, which also means I can't make the garden nice either at the moment but that will all come in time.

I am however really missing my fruit trees that me and Dad planted at The Bakery - two apples (which technically belong to Cranham Scout Group), a golden plum and a cherry. The apples were producing from the first year and they were large sweet watery green things - normally only one or two per tree a year, the plum had only started producing a few here and there when we left. If they are still there then they will now be starting to crop properly. However they were not in the best place for water and I wonder if anyone has watered them.

There is however a community orchard opening up near us so I am hoping to be able to get onto that - but it is being restricted to the houses around the space which we just miss being - so we will see.

The final death nail has gone into the coffin of the dream we had - I was still thinking we could save up and buy it all back and then be in control and do good things like the balcony and conservatory and the orchard proper etc... 6 yrs of wasted effort, time and money (the rent (which we wanted to be a mortgage) - we paid and did alot of structural repairs and things and tried to buy chunks of it at various points, paid for and did a hell of a lot of gardening) - but it was not to be. However it is also a relief - we didn't have the sort of money that was needed to sort the place out - mainly because we were there and Alaric did not take work deals that would have taken him out of the UK to live - I know he feels incredibly frustrated over this. But now we have the practical house and not the dream house and we can achieve everything but the goats and hydro-electricity (for which some of the infrastructure is already in place down there thanks to Al and the work men after the flood), and it just won't look as pretty.

There are no ifs and buts now, as we are too far down the line there are only happends - but I do wonder how things would have been different if we had stayed in Essex - I would have had a science career, I think, which would have slowly mutated to a communication role so in some ways - I think it has just been a different path to the same thing.

Maybe one day we will have our tumble down farm to do up with various out buildings to turn into workshops and art studios - though we are pretty happy here. In my opinion we moved here to Gloucestershire, too young whilst we were still formulating careers and so money was up and down and I was ill etc...

Dumped in the same situation now I would do things very differently indeed.

The Successes and Disasters of the Garden! (by sarah)

There are loads of little apples on the apple tree! The potatoes are doing epically well, I have been living off of garden salad for weeks and we have for the first time ever... Chillies! I have never been able to keep the plants alive long enough to get anything off of them 🙂

However the slugs have pretty much eaten all of my squash plants 🙁 Which actually just as well as we still don't have an allotement and after pestering the council it looks like we still wont have one by the end of the year so I had nowhere to plant the braccias - I popped them in where the squashes had been this weekend. Also our neighbours have rearranged their garden resulting in them giving us a plastic chest seat thingy - the sort I have been saving up to buy! So I have finally managed to clear all the potting compost and spare pots and what not up 🙂

The 'grassy area' is basically were I am growing stuff for now until we get the allotement. Due to roof fixing there is a big bag of stuff to be burnt and planks of wood randomly scattered around the garden and I'm not sure when we will next have a weekend to sort that lot out! Once our budget has recovered from buying roof sealent stuff I think we are going to have to get decking paint as it is starting to break up in places. There is a bramble in Mary's bit of the garden which we need to sort! Jean's Pirate Cove is starting to look good and I think it is all generally moving forward!

My tomatos have fruit on them but just haven't looked healthy for weeks :/ Buns still hasn't gotten his bigger run though he's not in a small one as it is and continually gets to run round the entire garden!

Jean and her friends decimated my salad by making a salad for Alaric - just as well with the weather the way it is the radishes I hadn't already harvested began to 'run' and were getting a little woody so they picked all of those , and the chives and the lettuce - Mary just ate the salad from the pot!

Alaric enjoyed his salad 🙂

Roof repairs (by alaric)

For some time, I have been spending much of my free time trying to make my workshop more habitable.

Back in April last year, I started putting up shelves and putting things away; when we moved in, I had been able to set the furniture up and put things away on them, but without shelves up, much remained in boxes on the floor.

I've since made another shelf and installed that, meaning that everything is finally put away to my satisfaction, but most of my effort has been going into fixing the leaking, draughty, and ivy-penetrated roof. This has involved two parallel jobs: sealing the eaves - now all done, and air vents installed for controlled air flow to avoid condensation - and repairing the leaking roof itself.

I started the latter by building a wall-mounted ladder, to make it practical to actually get up on the roof to work on it. This was four days of work (1 2 3 4). With that in place, I've been able to nip up onto the roof and - more importantly - get down again easily. This is no mean feat, as I'm not at all happy about heights; and the plastic sheet that had been stapled to the roof by the previous folks in an attempt to fix the leaks was quite slippery when wet. Being on a slippery surface sloping down to a drop of several meters suddenly made me remember a series of recurring childhood nightmares I had about having to escape terrible peril by climbing up steep, slippery, slopes, which wasn't much fun...

The intolerably wet weather of last summer (and this one is starting off little better) had caused lots of damage in the workshop. Water came in through the roof by the pint; I tried to position buckets underneath the places where it dripped, but on several occasions these overflowed and I had to move furniture to mop up the huge resulting puddles. Where water had splashed its way onto tools and furniture and supplies, there was rusting and water stains, that I have done my best to clear up; and the high humidity in the building from all the pools of standing water led to fungus problems.

Clearly, something had to be done. The problem was that most flat roofing processes seemed to require a period of dry weather to execute them, and generally required that the wooden deck underneath the roof surface was dry to begin with. With gaps in the rain being unpredictable and short, this didn't seem to be an option for my roof, so I used the ladder to keep performing temporary repairs to the plastic sheet (with little success), and nailing it back down whenever the wind caught it and tore it up at one end or the other.

However, I recently found out about a roof repair material by the name of Acrypol+, which advertises as a feature that it can be applied to damp surfaces; it's able to adhere and cure in a wet environment, being a thick oily liquid when applied. Basically, it's a form of thick acrylic paint, with fine fibres mixed into it that provide structural integrity to the coating once it has dried. It's not recommended to apply it to wood, but my roof is still covered by the (cracked, single layer of) felt underneath the plastic sheeting, so it would be fine to pull the plastic sheet off and apply Acrypol+ to the felt. In effect, the felt would just become the backing for a new sheet of waterproof material covering my roof.

One end of the plastic sheet was easily pulled up, so I applied the first can of Acrypol+:

You can see the exposed felt towards the bottom; it's in pretty poor shape, and has many small tears and holes in it. Also, the rate at which bits fall out of the trees is quite something.

From a little further away (and in more typical weather), you can see that in comparison to the rest of the roof:

I couldn't get all that junk (particularly the large yellow bag, which is full of trimmings from the trees above) down single-handedly, so I had to wait for a friend to come and visit. Andy is a confident rock climber so is much less worried about heights than I am, so was able to be a lot bolder! Together, we made short work of removing all the weights and junk on the roof, and removing the plastic sheeting.

Underneath, I could finally see that various routes by which water had been getting into the workshop. There were a few places where the gaps between the boards comprising the roof coincided with tears in the felt; water made its way under the plastic sheet through rips in it, or through the join where the two halves of the plastic sheet met in the middle (which was not sealed at all, just slightly overlapped and stapled down), and then run along to these places and dripped through. We nailed spare bits of felt over all the major tears, then set about painting the entire roof with Acrypol+. Before long it was done, shining brilliantly in the sun:

There's still a gap at the far right (look near to where the TV antenna is mounted); the edge of the roof has a sizeable gap between it and the upright board that forms the rim around the roof (which is called a "soffit board" if you want to get technical). I couldn't get the Acrypol+ to bridge across this yawning chasm, so I waited several days to let it cure enough to walk on, then went and squirted a load of roof-repair sealant along the gap.

When I get a chance, I'll paint Acrypol+ across that sealant (it's not a perfect seal, as I found when it rained a few days later, and some water still oozed down through that route). I will also paint more along the seams between the overlapping sheets of felt and around the felt patches we added, as they are the most likely points of failure; thermal expansion or other movements on the roof may cause the sheets to try and pull apart, so they could do with reinforcement.

Acrypol+ is sold as a repair system for leaking flat roofs, rather than as a coating for new ones; that, and the fact that it's a lot cheaper than a whole new roof, tells me that this is to be considered a temporary repair rather than a whole new roof. But if it works for a few years, it will give me time to save up for a proper re-surfacing with something like Sealoflex 10, and will hopefully mean that the wooden deck beneath is nice and dry!

With that out of the way, there's a few more things I want to do to the workshop itself - but they can wait; with the water kept out, there's fun projects to work on. First of all will be resurrecting my furnace, and getting some aluminium melting again!

We Love Sugru (by sarah)

We love Sugru which is a putty like stuff that you can form into shapes, sticks to just about everything and is flexible - it is basically a funky silicon rubber from my understanding. When we first heard about it we couldn't get hold of any and so had to wait as they had sold out but the wait was worth it!

Since then we have used it for tonnes of things from embedding electronics in hair pieces, making creatures for the visually impaired, fixing fridges, shoes, adding little feet and buffers to all things electronic, fixing broken mugs and making jewellery. I plan to fix my electric guitar with it though need to see how it reacts to having glitter added to it!

But it is more important to me than it's usefulness. To me Sugru represented something more, when it appeared I was struggling with both scientists and artists telling me that there was no cross over between the two areas. My tag line o twitter is that I am The Artist Scientist or Artistic Scientist and to see this product - the result of something an artist (ok design student) had produced, being so wonderful for science/tech and artistic endevours.

This was the sort of fusion of art and science that I was sure should exist but was being told didn't and my examples of how the modle builders of film dinosaurs had ended up solving the mystery of joints and movement that paleaontologists has been struggling with was falling on deaf ears.

So I turned up at The Cheltenham Science Festival debate on science verses art that year with my sugru bracelet and my ESA t-shirt I'd won for Celestial Montage and found that people didn't seem to really cae on either side of the divide, they have their opinions of the others and that is that. Stuck in the middle as all ways I gritted my teeth and looked for more science-art related things and found it under the title science communication.

Recently Sugru posted their life story so far and asked what inspired others, so I told them - they inspired me! They provided the evidence I needed that science and art can create wonderful productive and helpful things by learning from each other, they are an example of a dream that was followed and they provided the very material I had been trying to work out how to make myself - I was mucking around with resins casting, silicon mould making and fimo in order to get something like sugru and I was failing and could not make the projects I wanted. I hadn't even thought of applications beyond my own ends and there WOP! appeared sugru ready to go and so I went and so did Al and he has even written up one of his repairs/hacks for their website!

Day 4 of making the ladder (by alaric)

I wasn't scheduled another project day until later in the month, but I had some spare time and the opportunity to grab a volunteer (my father in law, Len) to help, so yesterday I mounted the ladder on the wall!

(Background: Days 1, 2 and 3).

The first step was drilling the holes. I held the ladder up against the wall, and checked it with a spirit level, while Len pencilled the holes in.

Then it was time to drill. I'm very fond of my SDS+ drill (as I have mentioned previously) so it was good to have an excuse to get Vera out again:

Without further ado, I started to drill:

However, disaster struck on one of the holes - the bit suddenly went sideways, into some kind of void inside the concrete blocks of the wall. Doh! I fitted a smaller drill bit and managed to drill back into the route the hole was supposed to take, then drill that out so the bolt could go in straight, but now it was in the middle of a much larger hole than intended so it would just rattle around and not hold anything.

Thankfully, I over-engineered the design so that it had far more mountings to the wall than it really needed, so none of them were all that critical. What I did was to jam a piece of wooden dowel into the misaligned part of the hole to fill much of the space, then squirt a load of fine mortar (2 parts sand to 1 part cement) into the rest. More on that later.

With that done, I could fit the anchor bolts to the ladder. The anchor bolts consist of a normal-seeming bolt that goes through the ladder, into a sleeve that goes into the wall. The sleeve is a metal tube, but at the far end is a conical nut that the bolt screws into. When the bolt is tightened the conical nut is pulled into the metal sleeve, forcing it to expand to tightly squeeze against the surrounding masonry.

So to start with, I put all the bolts through the ladder and screwed the sleeves on a few turns to hold them in place:

Then we lifted it up and guided the bolts into the holes and wiggled it into place. Of course, as it's nearly impossible to drill holes into masonry accurately, the holes were a few millimetres out from where the holes in the ladder are, so beyond a certain point the bolts started to chafe against the masonry and had to be tapped into place with a mallet:

All except the hole packed with mortar, of course, which the bolt just slid into squelchily.

Then we tightened the bolts - all except the one in the wet mortar; I'm going to give that a few days for the mortar to cure before I tighten it, otherwise there's no resistance to the expanding sleeve and it'll just squeeze the mortar out.

And then it was time for a test.

After gingerly doing a few pull-ups on the ladder, I climbed onto it. And then to check it's really secure, I put as much strain on it as I could by stretching myself out to get the maximum torque:

This failed to tear it out of the wall, so the next step was to actually climb up to the roof:

See how the top rung protects the gutter? That's careful design, that is! 🙂

However, it was cold, damp, and slimy up there, so I climbed back down and had some lunch. After lunch, I put some sealant around the edges of the mounting flanges, to prevent water getting in behind them where it might soak into the wall through the bolt hole, or lurk around and make the flanges rust. Also, I like sealant and will use it whenever I can:

This stuff is "frame sealant", which is specifically designed to join metal, wood and masonry outdoors, as opposed to the stuff you use in your bathroom. It's extra sticky to bond to awkward surfaces and extra stretchy to account for thermal expansion differences.

I also cut some small cubes of wood and pressed them into the open ends at the top of the ladder, packed with plenty of sealant. I tapped them in with a hammer to about a centimetre below the open end and squeezed more sealant in on top, and domed it slightly to keep rain from pooling.

Now that ladder is done, as soon as I get some time I'm going up there to secure part of the plastic sheet that's flapping up, and have a general poke around to see if I can find any holes to seal. With more sealant! Yay!

Also, I need to touch up the paint on the ladder in a few spots where I dinged it moving it around. Whoops!