Thursday, June 26, 2008

Guess I Better Eat ma' Wheaties Tomorrow


Marianna, Star and I are renting a truck tomorrow and heading out to New Jersey to pick up part one of the Black Locust order. I guess it ended up being cheaper for us to rent a little box truck and go pick it up at their mill than to have them deliver it to us. So - should make for quite a day. Other than the road food - I'm also excited to get a look at the wood and see what we are gonna be working with. We are then cruising over to some place to pick up some huge order of aluminum. Long and short of it is: better put on my work muscles tomorrow. Sigh.

Today we got more from Harriet - the X-Bracing connection sizes, final bolt sizes for the Channel connections, and couple other things. The only thing left I need from her is the Greenhouse base bolt sizing and then we are good to go! Today I also put in the order for the footings, for real this time - and we ordered a bunch of the angle stuff that we'll hopefully be getting tomorrow. The real issue now is that I should be working on both the greenhouse AND the Steel from now on. So somehow I have to figure out a way to split myself down the middle. Any ideas?


Part of the Greenhouse catalog. East columns, west columns, and rafters.

Column Assembly Guide detail - WC0 + NM0 (Thats: West Column, line 0 - plus North Mullion, line 0)

The closest thing I could come up with was to put down every little bit of knowledge we have about the greenhouse on paper - or at least on 3D model, and then on paper. We've put together a catalog of elements, a column and rafter assembly guide, a window fabrication guide, and installation guides for the east, west and south faces. Basically, we modeled every element and then played through the construction sequences, recording it all in drawings. We'll see how it works - but I think it is all pretty clear. My hope is that if I do this right - I should be able to hand this packet to someone and they should have no trouble at all putting this thing together. Think: IKEA drawings. Or, better yet: Lego instruction books.

Problem is, it isn't just snapping together components; there is some crazy milling and some (hopefully) nice joinery on some of these elements, and so that isn't necessarily something you can learn from drawings. My old boss used to like to say that he could show anyone how to build anything, but not everyone was capable to actually performing it. Takes a little bit of . . . touch. Anyway, we'll see how it all goes. Hopefully I can jump back and forth between the two without too much trouble.


Jason, Shulzie and Solveig spent the day laying out the north garden planters.

Paul and Margot's toolshed steel frames. Very nice!

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