Woodie
 

Mr Mikanos,

Is that a wooden trailer I see???????

Maybe you need a woodie as a tow car.......



Stiffy

Some really good points Spook. I'm fitting a roller door on the downwind side of the shed. The roller door won't lead to anywhere, but it will give me natural light to the work bench and it will get that airflow.
A bushfire raging through here would be a wild sight! The back 4 acres is untouched natural and heavily treed bushland, and it all heads up to me - and the shed - on the crest. I have 3x36000 litre water tanks in an emergency, but I'd probably look at plumbing a petrol powered pump into the new tank I'm getting for the shed to keep it close by.

Serpnt, that's a killer shed and car combo. Keep that theme going; add a GT40 and Pantera and the collection will be complete!

Make sure your tanks aren't plastic and have a fire hose outlet on the tanks so the rural fire guys can access it directly into their trucks.

This is what I am doing when we move to Mount Gambier.
Love the setup.

I think you will find plastic tanks are fine.
We make fire tanks all the time.

Check out "Garage Journal Forums" That is very entertaining.. especially the gallery.
For fire protection..a bloke on the central coast survived a fire storm by having a sprinkler system on his shed roof. It made a heavy mist cloud over the building. Cooling and putting out any flying embers. He also had plugs for the guttering down pipes so they filled with water.

Another day, another new machine arrives. With a few bags of cement going in to each hole yesterday to make a stable and level base for the columns, today was the day the steel arrived along with a good sized forklift. On a separate delivery was the biggest forklift I've ever seen. Tomorrow the scissor lift will turn up.

Everything is coming from a workshop over an hour away, so the return trips, loading and unloading took up a lot of the day. Tools and steel are now laid out and ready to get serious tomorrow. Shame it's due to rain, but I only have the mega-forklift for a short time so we'll be out there rain, hail or shine.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4272/3...799d4d27_c.jpg

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4208/3...08f609e3_c.jpg

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4281/3...01030ccb_c.jpg

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4260/3...8303f2f7_c.jpg

Oh, and that blue magnet at the bottom of the last photo has made it so easy to manoeuvre individual beams. Such a time saver rather than having to strap or chain everything!

Look awesome Craig and hope the rain did not impact to much.

Look at the size of those beams.... Can't wait to see this constructed.

.

so a shed run may be on the card when finished
& a tour of the new place too

The scissor lift arrived today, but so has a few inches of rain. Bugger! The smaller machinery is getting bogged and it's not a safe or fun option to try to work in the pouring rain and on the increasingly soft site. There goes about $1000 worth of machinery hire down the drain...

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4217/3...090be99c_c.jpg

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4242/3...291359ac_c.jpg

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4251/3...0cc832bc_c.jpg

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4284/3...311a8f61_c.jpg

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4216/3...26c99980_c.jpg

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4267/3...747a0834_c.jpg

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4212/3...208c0837_c.jpg

It is great to see at least the first frame sitting in the hole, as I can now start to get an appreciation for the scale of the shed. It was a very frustrating day, but also really pleasing to start to see what the shed size is going to look like.

Geeze mate, of all the weeks to have non stop rain, after months of fine dry ground hardening weather.

Hope things clear up, dry out and you can get underway again.

Another week of unseasonal rain and we started the weekend drawing away excess water and mud in the holes with a vacuum cleaner. I headed for the skies to see things from a different angle.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4273/3...da5d8d9c_c.jpg

...and then the sun came out.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4275/3...4d8d98c2_c.jpg

Shame it hadn't dried the ground enough. We still managed to get the forklift and scissor lift bogged again.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4224/3...ffe8b736_c.jpg

I can't tell you how happy I am to get the frame up. Dad (Donunder) spent the entire weekend here helping out. I had originally hoped that he could spend 2 or 3 hours just helping to guide the columns into the holes. It turned into an entire weekend of manual labour that would have been better suited to a 20 year old tradie. Dad was bloody brilliant, and while young at heart, was doing things I shouldn't have expected a someone to be doing at 70+ years old. Huge effort Dad - thanks a million!

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4206/3...228fa0c3_c.jpg

Council chambers, eastern office.

That is freeking huge (that's what she said!)

Looks like a new Bunnings store going up.

I bag a room with a view please

What's a new weekend without a new machine on the site! The 4WD scissor lift made it very easy to move around the pad, even where it was slightly damp.
https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4237/3...8c7d4550_c.jpg

Every minute of daylight on the weekend was spent measuring lengths, levels and angles. Another lesson I've learnt is that I should have been at home to supervise the holes being drilled, and I should have drilled 600mm holes. The 450mm holes proved to be too tight for the 310mm columns when factoring in a bit of misalignment in the holes. Nothing that a bit of work with a crowbar couldn't resolve, but for the sake of a bit of extra money for additional concrete in the hole it would have saved some time and physical effort.

It was really satisfying to loosely bolt the frames and top hats together, and to see the way everything pulled into alignment as we tweaked and tapped things around. By "tweak", sometimes that meant to push a top hat a millimetre to the side and sometimes it meant swinging a sledgehammer to move a seemingly immovable object.

Coming up the hill, the shed is taking shape nicely with the frame squared up and all top hats in place, and it looks pretty imposing against the leafy backdrop:

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4205/3...c7868e55_c.jpg

...but if you continue along up the driveway and look back down to the shed, it doesn't stand out like dogs balls.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4254/3...902a2cdc_b.jpg

When I built my shed I made it perfectly level. Then after it rained, the water wouldn't run down the gutters. It was to level. :mad:
JD

THE BEST THING about your shed Craig is there no need for internal columns! I was too tight fisted to spec up the steel on mine. Never again!

Interesting point JD.