…as this every time, I wouldn’t have to do it any more as I would have made so much money that I would be paying people to do them for me.
It’s a three-way joint as you can see and it’s come out perfectly. Even more impressive is the fact that I cut it by hand with not a power tool in sight. In fact I’m working entirely by hand and battery power at the moment. It’s not that I’m running out of battery charge on the solar panels but today was another miserable day for electricity generation with a low cloud hovering over here all day and there’s no point in wasting the current on electric saws when a hand saw, a mallet and chisel and a battery-powered drill can do everything that I need.
In fact I’ve not had a decent amount of solar energy since 26th November. What wouldn’t I give now for some of that current that I couldn’t accept in the summer? It’s clear skies and thousands of stars outside right now but of course it’s night-time. As soon as the sun rises, you just watch the clouds gather.
But back to the plot. About 5 minutes after I had fitted that joint, I took it out and replaced it with something else due to a slight change of plan. And that joint wasn’t anything like as good. Much more to my usual standard.
And I now have two stairs fitted anyway, thanks to a discovery of a large offcut from when I did the flooring in the barn. I’ve taken down the ladder and I’m now using a stepladder and the two stairs to get into here. It’s a climb though – about 3 feet off the top of the ladder and we were discussing this on Facebook, a few of us and I reckoned that I could put an intermediary step by way of a couple of cantilever outriggers.
And then it hit me! “Good!” – ed. As soon as I said “cantilever”, I worked out exactly how I am going to build my stairs and it’s so simple that I’m surprised that I haven’t thought of it before. And I can use up tons of the scrap wood that’s lying around here too. Getting my stairs in for Christmas might not be as far out as you might think. Yes, if the French can build a cantilever viaduct not 30kms from here and I’m already planning on building a flying staircase for the ground floor on the “suspension” principle, then there’s no reason why I can’t build a staircase on the cantilever principle up here.
I made a major discovery too. A few weeks ago I bought a job lot of screws from LIDL. They are good value and the boxes are very handy. And it just so happened that I needed to use some of them today. And blow me up if they aren’t torx drive – and the box came with a couple of torx bits inside too. And I tell you what – I’m well-impressed with how easily they screw in and out with not a hint of a slipping driver. I could be sold on this idea.
So tomorrow I’m going to fit the third step here and then start on the uprights that I need to fit so that I can crack on with the stairs. Things are looking up LOL.
In other news, this is the page that has been attracting hits to my site. The other day the hits went up from the 180s or so to 302 and judging by the page counters, it was this page that they were visiting. There’s no evidence that they came from a search engine or a link – it seemed to be all “direct hits” so someone has circulated the page around. I’m intrigued as to who it is and what it is that has caught their eye and whether there will be a follow-up.
We shall see.
