Tuesday 20 December 2011

XMAS recap

Merry Christmas to all my followers.

And to Clive who kindly sent me a card he had produced using Gannet Photo.


Thanks Clive and Merry Christmas to you.

Sunday 4 December 2011

Lesson in concrete

I suppose it is obvious when you think about it but concrete is hard stuff.  In some ways.

Last week Dave kindly removed the metal lid off the floor area in the kitchen where the cooker was housed.  Removing the concrete around that metal was awkward but what we found beneath just raises one question.  Why?  Why on earth did they need to fill the metal surround beneath in more concrete.  Not the weaker stuff they had skimmed the kitchen floor with but full on nasty hard stuff.




The issue in this case was that the concrete was within a full metal surround.  The last time I worked on the concrete I found it broke up easily provided that it had somewhere to go.  Essentially, concrete is excellent under compression but not under tension.  Trying to break this stuff was hard because it had nowhere to go.  It meant that the first hour was spent turning a few square inches to dust.  But as a gap appeared the rest came away easily.    Job done now and Dave can now cut the remainder out.

The radio room cabling is now all but done.  The fog horn amplifiers now just need removing from the wall allowing me to strip back the final woodwork.  

Dave did clean down the wheel house very well.  That room is now clear for a rebuild.  Still in two minds on whether to put back some of the missing portholes in that room.  They are square and I suspect that it will be very hard to find any matching ones.  Pipes now shifted from the kitchen (bilge and sea water) and from the mess.