While we waited for our latest modification we have done to our basin bowl mould, we decided to do one of the tasks that have been outstanding for quite a while now, which is to do two things. One was to glue in the captive nuts in the lid. We noticed that sometimes, they would pop out when we push in our special hatch keys, to screw the handle and then lift the hatch up, but instead, would pop the nut out. So, we went around all twenty-three of them and glued all these captive nuts back into place using construction glue. We also populated missing ones as well.
The second task we did to these hatch lids, is to drill out a clearance embedded hollows, to take a 14mm washer and hide the head of a bolt so that both are below the surface. Then, we drilled a 6mm hole through the rest of the material which will allow a 35mm length bolt to poke through and will connect to another captive nut that will be screwed into the framework of the floor joists. We have positioned four of these “fixing down” points around the four corners of the hatches, 60mm in from each edge. We will have to glue a block of wood into each of the corners of the framework, but, we can do that later on.
We had selected two of these hatches, to test out this technique last week and glued in a 63mm square block of wood in each of the four corners, and so we could see that when the 6mm hole was drilled, it went into the block underneath which was widened out to a 8mm hole, to allow for the captive nut to be itself screwed in as well. Then, the lid was bolted down nice and tight, to stop the various clunking noises when walking up and down the hallways.
It worked very well.
Right, that is another job done .. well half done .. we still have to glue in those wooden corner blocks .. but that it another time .. while we are waiting for glue or paint to dry somewhere!!