Sunday 10 March 2019

Slow Progress

Well autumn may have arrived and we have been receiving some welcome light autumn showers but the temperature is still sufficiently high for me to only want to do 30 minutes of outdoor labour.  I’ve been digging up the water reticulation pipes in the front garden where the pepper gum tree used to be before I felled and removed it.  The problem is tree roots, which I’m trying to remove.  Along the way I’ve managed to put the shovel through one pipe <grrrr>.

When I’d had enough of digging I went back into the air-conditioned house to check on the faulty media server pc.  I have replaced the faulty solid state drive which had the operating system on it.  However the computer then decided to randomly connect the four hard drives.  The problem was making me very frustrated, but eventually I managed to get the BIOS to recognise all the drives (don’t know how or why).  Yesterday the pc ran all day rebuilding a blank RAID drive (this combines all four drives into one large drive with built in redundancy).  This morning it was finished, only for it to then disappear.  I’m back to doing it all again!

On a more positive note I was able to install the shed earth spike.  Things have obviously changed in the last 50 years.  As a young apprentice the earth spike I installed were four foot lengths of 1½ inch galvanized water pipe.  Today they are a copper coated steel rod.

  

There was something hard in the ground where I wanted to install it.  I thought it might be an old brick.  However after some light digging I discovered it was the 100mm PVC pipe I’d installed for the floor outlet of my future dust extraction system.  You would have thought I’d have remembered that <it’s an age thing>.

All done!  I just need to apply some Sikaflex around the grey PVC pipe to prevent the steel cladding sheet from rusting.

The 100mm PVC sewer pipe and fittings for the sawdust duct have been delivered.  I laid out the fitting on the bench to confirm how everything would be assembled.

Obviously I haven’t placed the lengths of pipe in between the fittings.  The duct will be dry fitted (no glue) so I can disassemble it should there be a blockage.

It is possible to buy clips to hold the pipe to the wall but I decided to make some from scrap plywood.  Why spend money unnecessarily!

The system won’t be installed until I have the ‘blast gates’.  They could be diy made using plywood and PVC pipe, but the commercial version is currently available at a March discounted price.

We really must make an effort to get out of the house and do something interesting!

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