Day 12 construction: All hands on deck

What was forecast to be a rain sodden day turned out to be another sunny day of production on site.

The fixing of the bottom brackets...

..unleashed a framing frenzy that went on as long as daylight lasted. Creating a circular deck inside the line of the posts turned out to be a bit complicated, but once we had a plan, tools and materials it flew. 

End of day progress shots... weren't possible because by the time we finished it was dark.

(PS but here is a shot taken the following morning...)

Day 11 construction- brackets and beams

A bit frustrating today as we struggled to fit the steel brackets to the poles. The trunks being so much larger than expected means longer drill bits, longer bolts, added complications. However, the first 4 brackets are in place allowing us to get the major floor structure into place by the evening...

End of day progress shots:

Day 10 construction: Reciprocality

Day 10 at the Iona Land site was a beautiful sunny one, and another relaxed day of preparation for the floor structure...

The highlight of the day was probably the testing of the reciprocal frame roof structure. You might remember a post from a couple of weeks ago describing Simon and Alina's work with Steve Wickham of Price & Myers engineers. These are some shots of the pinned balsa wood model they used to test the idea:

Well despite the fact that the principles of reciprocal frames are well understood and careful thought has gone into this one, we were nervous about whether it would work in practice. Here is our first attempt...

 

Iona Land Shelter- Roof structure test from Buzdjow on Vimeo.

In other news, the ropes and props finally came off the poles, leaving us with a proud freestanding woodhenge. A nice moment.

End of day progress shots:

Day 9 construction

Day nine was a quiet one after Friday's frenetic concreting: A site tidy up, the arrival, shifting and treatment of the construction timber, measuring up and building the central pad foundation. A change in gear as we move from heavy engineering towards more conventional methods such as bricklaying and carpentry.