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!

A Real Valentines Day (by sarah)

It is another valentines day and again me and Alaric have failed to do the traditional type of thing.

This time we built shelves for the kitchen (well got half way through building them with the help of my Dad).

We had take away pizza deal with wedges and stuff for 6 of us and I started reading the girls the complete works of Will S. on Jean's request.

We went through some songs that ment things to us and went to bed - mostly Nick Cave and Tori Amos.

We are happy with this - I don't think either of us was cut out for the standard hyped mush that happens with V-Day. As Alaric said it has become something repulsive with all the commercial stuff. The idea of having to buy expensive gifts to show your love :/

This doesn't mean we don't celebrate but it's more making cardboard hearts with the girls and covering stuff with glitter. Last year I knitted a phone cover for Al - that sort of thing.

This year I wrote him a poem.

Christmas 2010 (I think) (by sarah)

I think this is 2010 and that for actual Christmas we went down to Essex for dinner at my parents house but these are photos of our Solcist meal and general festiveness.

Jean and Al playing with the marble run.

King Alaric at the washing up again

Garlic Bread - as in bread with garlic gloves in it 🙂

Jeany sort of setting the table

Jean decorating the MK 2 of The Little Book of Festive Poetry - I spent ages printing out out the sheets and glueing the words onto the pictures as the laptop I had couldn't cope with me trying to do things with large files!

It snowed and I remember playing with Jean outside and me and Al taking it in turns!

Tom and Jean 🙂

Jean really could not get enough of being outside in the snow!

It was the first year we found a yard of Jaffa Cakes!

Jean ran off with them 🙂

Sleepy Jean after all the fun 🙂

Day 3 of making the ladder (by alaric)

Well, after two days of prior work on the ladder, yesterday I settled down to another day.

I started by welding together the second side of the ladder, to match the first. With that done, I now had the two sides of the ladder, ready to join them together with the rungs:

With that done, I carefully aligned everything on the welding bench and ground the welds on the inward sides down so that the rungs could fit on nicely:

I set the rungs back half a centimetre where they were attached at the same point as a spacer, so they were welded both to the uprights and to the spacers, as I felt this would be stronger. The pieces of wood you can see under the rungs are maintaining that spacing.

Now, as I mentioned before, I'm not very good at welding; I can make things structurally sound, but not pretty, because my welds often go wrong and I have to go over them again. This usually leads to big, messy, welds, and on a couple of occasions with this job, I actually melted a hole in the metal and had to patch it up. Here's one particularly terrible weld:

I ground the lumps around the edge of the hole down:

Then welded a metal plate over it:

This, in contrast, is I think the neatest weld I've ever made:

With all that done, the ladder was actually a ladder:

I sanded it down to get the weld gunk off, then washed it thoroughly in white spirit to remove the grease the metal came covered in, and laid it out in the kitchen to paint:

Then I gave it a priming coat and left it to dry overnight (I did it in the kitchen so it would be warm and dry overnight, rather than the cold and damp of the workshop):

It'll need another couple of coats of paint, and I need to cap the open ends of the uprights at the top, then I can mount it on the wall.

Part of welding that I always find quite profound is the way that a bunch of bits of metal, initially held together with clamps, and gingerly handled in case it comes undone, slowly transforms into a structure made of solid steel. This was driven home with the ladder project when, finishing the welds on the rungs, I found the best way was to lay it on its back like in the last photos and sit on it so the welds were flat (the best orientation, as molten metal likes to run away when the weld is vertical) and comfortable to reach; it didn't even flex!

I can't wait to be using it to get up on the roof. There's a flap of plastic sheeting lifting up in the wind and letting rain in, and I can't reach it in any other way...

Continue to day 4...

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...