Or, more accurately, a post about the deck.
Mostly.
Sorta.
See, I’ve been making some progress on the deck. It has stairs*, all the structural pallets are in, I’ve built a pillar:
On which the final pallet rests (or at least a chunk of timber rests, which supports two of the stringers of the final pallet. The other stringer runs along concrete its entire length).
Also:
*Proud*
Given how far off level the stairs were, it took quite a lot of careful alignment to get the pillar, and thus the final pallet level.
You can start to see how it’ll look now:
I’ve had great fun with the tetris that is trying to get different size chunks of pallet timber to roughly line up. And then, you can see that moment at the end when I realised that actually, I can just cut L shaped sections to slot in to the gaps. That makes life *so* much easier. And it will, I think, enhance the final appearance. It’s certainly better than the all-aligned section of four strips which I don’t like at all.
However, what it quickly revealed was that not only are the colleted autofeeding screws I got on very cheap, inadequate plastic (they tend to misfeed), also the autofeeding screwdriver’s one charging battery was unutterably pathetic.
So, given that it’s been raining for most of today (thus putting a massive crimp in my plans to have the deck surface more or less finished today) I did two things. One, because I got totally fed up with the washing machine’s drain leaking fairly spectacularly since I put the grate back (and we’ve got plumbers coming tomorrow to service the heating) – I fixed that. It required a wee bit of rerouting of the pipe to get it to come down at a less acute angle (in fact, it’s now nearly 90 degrees to the grate). A quick test suggests that the water now goes down the drain rather than hitting the grate and spraying in random directions.
Also, I took apart the battery for the autofeeding screwdriver battery pack. Well, the other one. I’d taken one apart already in the hopes that it might be reasonably fixable (it wasn’t). Taking apart the one that I’d been using (since it charged, at least a bit) I worked my way round with the volt meter… it started fairly well. The first few cells came up as 1.1 or 1.2 volts. Yay.
Then it started to go wrong. 0.6V, 0.4v, 0.1v, 0.0v… Oh arse. Of the 15 cells, 10 were less that 1v. Indeed, at least 5 of them were dead. Actually stone cold dead. The fact the thing charged at all was a miracle. So I worked my way through the other pack trying to find decent cells. There were about 4 that were over a volt…gradually my ‘acceptable minimum’ declined down to ‘err, 0.4 volts, that’ll do’.
I abused my dad’s old soldering iron, and hodged the pack back together – once assembled the pack had a stellar output of 11.7v. Which is closer to 18… A quick prayer to Saint Patrick, who is apparently the patron saint of engineers, and I stuck the battery in the charger…
Lo, the red ‘charging’ light did come on.
Now we just have to wait the 3 or 4 hours it says it takes to charge, and we’ll know whether we’ve got enough volts to make it go.
I have to say, there was quite a bit of swearing around this process. Not so much at the beginning, I’d worked out how to get it apart. But at the end, when I couldn’t coax the damn thing back into the case. Eventually I realised that it was just catching on the shoulder of the case, and that the reason it looked like it should just fit, but wasn’t, and that I couldn’t persuade it in, is that it was catching just at a crucial moment. However, since the pack was originally held together with sellotape**, a roll of sellotape was used to pull the two recalcitrant batteries together and suddenly, it slipped together with the ease of forcing a quart into a pint pot. A bit more swearing and brute force and it was together…
Anyhow, hopefully it’ll work, because when it is working, it’s quite fun using the autofeeding screwdriver. Kerchunk-whirrrrr. Etc.
* Although I’m not wholly happy with them, but that’s because I went for ‘steep’ and saved on building an extra step at the bottom. I probably should have gone with less steep and making an extra step. But hey.
** Yes, it’s clearly a quality item.
