One Leg Longer than the Other (by sarah)

So awhile ago Alaric started having horrible lower back pain which we thought was initially a slipped disc as did the Dr and he got refered to physio and he seemed sorted but then it came back, this time with exploding knee and things. It has been getting worse and more frequent though disappears in the intermediate stages - he had to be tested for various other nasty things like bone cancer etc... especially as he was having the night sweats and things but these were all clear.

Further prodding and pocking reveals he has a wonky pelvis leading to inflamation of the thorasic joint - he has siattica basically. He is fixable - especially as it appears the wonk has been caused in the first place by one leg being short than the other. He says in hind sight there has always been an issue with him getting into trouble for 'tripping people up' as he naturally stands with the longer leg sticking out.

So he needs manipulation and special shoes, but the nhs wont fix him, they will prescribe pain killers and send him to pain management but wont fix him as it will cost too much. His Dr has given him the contact details for the person she went too as she had the same problem.

I just don't understand the logic of the nhs - left untreated he will end up a cripple and dependent costing them alot of money. I suppose it's why save money for a tomorrow we shall not see :/

But more than that - when I was at school we had a medical in secondary school where they measured everything and checked spins were straight and all sorts - he apparently didn't have this - I can't help but think the leg issue would have been picked up then - the amount of damage all ready done which could have been solved by made to measure shoes with different height soles :/

So the mission is to sort him out - we can't afford for both of us to be cripples. When his back is bad we have to work together in the most ludicrous of ways to get the most simple things done. Not too bad at the moment as I am walking again but there were a few dicey weeks when I was on crutches and he couldn't lift anything last year. We had to work in tandum to get the baby seat in the car etc...

Sealing up the workshop’s eaves (by alaric)

I keep moaning about how the workshop roof leaks, causing rain to drop down on all my nice tools and supplies. But that's not the only problem with the workshop roof!

The workshop is basically a set of walls, with the roof resting on top. The roof is a large, flat, box with the bottom open (exposing the rafters that give it strength), slightly larger than the outline of the walls. The rafters rest on the tops of the walls, and the roof hangs slightly over the walls.

As you may have guessed if you've been following that, this means there's gaps all the way around the edge of the roof. Howling winds blow through them. These holes are enormous at the ends of the building, where the roof overhangs further; twenty centimetres high and occupying most of the length of the walls (interrupted only by the rafters themselves), but I've pinned up sheets of plastic to temporarily block them until I get around to cutting lots of rectangles of wood to properly cover them with.

Along the longer walls of the building, the gap is more like a centimetre, but again more or less the entire length of the building (which is somewhere around ten metres).

And the worst part is, the rear wall is close to a row of trees, which are covered in ivy. And the ivy has found the gaps and keeps oozing its way into the roof.

And as well as being faintly disturbing, the ivy also drops foul grime down onto my stuff.

So, although stopping the roof leaking is a long-term project I work on when I get entire days to spend building the ladder to get up there, I've been fighting the ivy when I've just had a few hours here and there. I've been cutting bits of thin wood (left-over cladding) and nailing them in place over the larger holes, and then liberally applying left-over bits of sealant to all the edges (I suspect the ivy attacks a gap if it sees light, so hopefully this will make it lose interest). The black marks on the ceiling are damage made by ivy I've torn out:

There's no less than three different colours of sealant there - two different cartridges of brown "frame sealant", one light and one dark, and some leftover bits of white stuff from the bathroom! Unbelievably, it looks miles neater than the mess of cobwebby, grimy, ivy that was there!

I have to climb right up into the eaves to get most of the gaps, however. This picture is not particularly clear, but there's a thin plank of wood that I've nailed down to the top of the wall in order to cover the two-centimetre gap between the top of the wall and the vertical wooden beam at the back, then I've run sealant all around all the gaps and joints:

I quite like working with sealant (I've been sealing gaps in the bathroom, and replacing existing manky mouldy sealant - and doing it neatly, unlike the ghetto job I'm doing in the workshop), and it's nice to think that I'm keeping out all those draughts and grubby plants! I want to properly seal all the gaps in the workshop - and then introduce an extractor fan over the welding bench at one end, and an air inlet vent at ground level at the other end, with a small heater under computer control so I can regulate the temperature and keep the humidity down in here!

I've also started varnishing a bit of scrap MDF that, I have realised, is exactly the right size to make a shelf to go over my workbench (not the welding bench, the one where I have the column drill). That will give me a place to put loads of things that currently sit ON my workbench for lack of a shelf. Also, I'll be able to fit a decent light to the bottom of the shelf; right now, when I work at the workbench, I cast a huge shadow over whatever I'm doing.

Day 2 of making the ladder (by alaric)

Yesterday, I cut out all the bits required to make myself a ladder.

This morning, I set out on foot to visit Machine Mart and Screwfix for some supplies; a set of magnetic welding clamps, some white metal paint for the completed ladder, and these anchor bolts to attach it to the wall. As you can see from the diagram on the box, they just can't wait to be buried in a wall:

Anyway, it's been a long time since I last did any welding (and I've never been great at it), so I started by just tacking a few bits together to check they line up correctly with the wall. I started with the trickiest bit, the angled spacer:

Then I proceeded to drill correctly-sized holes for my anchor bolts into the mounting flanges, using my column drill (a very useful tool). This made a lot of pretty swarf:

Then I started welding the flanges onto the spacers. The new magnetic welding clamps (the red thing in this picture) came in handy here; their function is to accurately hold things at ninety (or forty-five) degree angles:

With all six of the spacers flanged, I could start tack-welding them into place:

My welds on the flat were OK, but my welds inside corners are still pretty ropy; I had to keep chipping the slag off and going over again to fill in gaps. Another problem was that the steel square tubing has rounded corners, meaning that when a spacer has to be welded onto the upright to make a T, two sides of the end of the spacer are to be welded to the curved corner of the upright, making a big gap I had to bridge across somehow. It turns out that surface tension causes the exposed edge of the metal to pull back when it melts, so I had to bodge little slivers of metal left over from the cutting into the gap to stop this happening, resulting in some ugly welds that I may have to grind flat before I paint it - or to make the surfaces I'm going to weld the rungs onto flat enough for them to go on straight! We'll see.

Anyway, having checked the fit against the wall, I could then finish off the welds on all four sides of each junction, completing one side of the ladder. It's intentional that the flanges point in different directions, by the way - they mainly point upwards so the weight of the ladder isn't pulling them away from the wall, except that the one on the angled spacer has to be underneath so I can get in to fit the bolt, and the top one is underneath so the anchor bolt hole isn't too near the top of the wall:

At that point I ran out of time. It won't take me too long to assemble the second side as I already have all the flanges welded onto the spacers (which was quite time-consuming), and I can clamp it all onto the existing side to get the alignment correct without all the cross-checking and measuring I had to do the first time.

After that, I'll need to weld the rungs in place, tidy up the welds, scrub it down with a wire brush and sandpaper to clean off all the welding grime, degrease it with white spirit, and paint it.

Then I need to figure out how I'm going to get it into the wall! I'll need to somehow hold it in place while I mark out the drill holes, which might be tricky without an assistant. Then I have to try to drill the holes where the marks actually are (the bane of my life is carefully marking out a wall, starting to drill, and the bit hitting a stone and suddenly meandering half a centimetre off centre - then having to try and jam a screw in nonetheless, as whatever I'm screwing to the wall has holes in places that can't move to match).

After that, holding it up to the wall and slipping in the anchor bolts should be easy - then tighten them up and I'm done! They have a tightening torque recommendation on the box, so I'll finally get to use my torque wrench, and not be left wondering if I've tightened them enough or risking cracking the wall by over-tightening (which has been a concern with previous anchor bolt expiditions).

Continue to day 3...

Day 1 of making the ladder (by alaric)

This weekend, I am attempting to make a fixed ladder, mounted to the wall of my workshop so I can fix the roof more easily.

First, I had to tidy up in the workshop to make room. I bought a set of four folding chairs for guests which are rather in the way (the chairs, not necessarily the guests), So I screwed a few bits of scrap wood up between the beams to store them:

See all that damp on the ceiling, by the way? That is the enemy! Eradicating that is the long-term goal of this whole mission.

With the chairs out of the way, I could get on with the task at hand. Here's the bit of wall where the ladder will go:

And here's the pile of steel I ordered from Hindleys to make it from:

The ladder is being made mostly from 1" square steel tubing, which needs to be cut into bits of various lengths with my trusty angle grinder. Here's the rungs (longer parts) and the spacers that will join it to the wall:

However, for extra strength and extra not-having-a-sharp-corner-ness, at the bottom it will be joined to the wall by an angled spacer on each side. The spacer will be at forty-five degrees to the vertical (and to the horizontal, thanks to the magic of maths), so I need to cut twenty two and a half degree angles onto the bottoms of the ladder uprights, like so:

Also, I needed to cut out two spacers with twenty two and a half degree angles at one end (to mate with the uprights) and forty five degree angles at the ends which will mount onto the wall, bringing my pile of various lengths of steel tube up to this:

Where the tubes need to attach to the wall, I'm going to weld them to flat steel plates, which will be drilled for the bolts that join them to the wall. All of the tube ends I've cut will be welded, so the fact that they're rough angle-grinder cuts doesn't matter, but these edges will be exposed, so the fact that they are nasty and burred offends me:

But a quick run along the bench grinder each has given them nice clean edges:

Sarah turned up and took a picture of me, just as I was finishing. Check out my lovely protective clothing - I take my safety seriously when dealing with forces that can make metal flow like honey:

Finally, I measure out the layout of the angled spacer, to check I'd done my maths correctly to make it the right length to produce a 30cm spacing, to match the straight spacers, and that the angles were right:

Tomorrow, I will go out shopping to buy some anchor bolts to mount it to the wall (I can't drill the holes in the plates until I know the diameter required), welding magnets so I can make sure the angles are exact as I weld it together (I don't want a wonky ladder), and some metal paint so it won't rust when it's installed - then it's time to start welding. I plan to start by making the sides with the angled and straight spacers so I can check they align perfectly by placing them one on top of the other, before welding the rungs in between them.

Continue to day 2...

Snow Garden (by sarah)

More snow fell after I took the pics and I regret not having gone out with the birthday money sooner and gotten my camera as it ment I was restricted to the half an hour of Al getting ready for work and his smart phone! However I did discover that the broken camera still records film ok so I did take some vids of the girls which I will attempt to process later on!

I made Al stop to take a pic of him as he left for work but alsa the camera went with him!

But here is what I got! None of the kids paying sadly 🙁 Though it turned out Mary hated the snow where as Jean spent hours out in the garden making snow angels and just walking around in it, sticking it too the walls etc... I made soup out of frozen veg in the freezer, and then Mary went down for her nap so I ended up building a snow man with Jean and having a snow fight where we both got covered!