Author: Shaun

Created Large Right Angle Framing Tool

We needed a tool to set out the rooms inside the house, as all the walls are right angled we needed something to get long right angled measurements. So we spent a few hours making a large framing square, using the mathematical and ancient truth that a right angle triangle measuring 3m by 4m always forms a 5m hypotenuse. So using a good quality and straight wooden batten, to form the base of the triangle, the 3metre side, we then took a flexible “cord” to stretch out to form the other two sides of the triangle.
But we were struggling to find a “cord” that will serve the purpose and not stretch alarmingly when tensioned. Ordinary string was no good, even high strength highly woven cord didn’t work (it stretched 50mm over 4m) and we resorted in using a piece of 1mm stainless steel wire (left-over from our bird disruption system up on the Skylight), this only stretched 3mm! Luckily, we had enough to make a 9metre piece with two marks at 4metres and 5metres.

Large-Framing-Square

So holding the wire out taut, at one of these marks, we can form either a left-handed or a right-handed triangle, which forms a good line perpendicular from the surface we placed the batten against.
We can mark the floor at the beginning and end points and if necessary, can extend the line out to the required length of the stud wall we are mapping out, and once that task is done, we can wrap up the wire around the batten and put it away in a nice compact package.

All-rolled-up

P.S. Can you spot our problem in the first photo?

The wire is looped around the roof post!

22 October 2020
Concrete Material for Sound-Proofing Shell for Entertainment Room collated and Ordered
After buzzing around several different suppliers, all across the country, looking for pre-stressed concrete beams and dense concrete blocks (the heavier 20kg ones), we chased down various prices, ranging from the wow high price to a super low price but a heavy delivery charge (eeek!), we have finally settled an agreement with our local builders merchants Jewson, to supply us with ..
- 10 concrete beams
- 650 heavy dense concrete blocks
- A pile of soft sand
- Some bags of cement
- A few large heavy paving slabs
- And a concrete lintel (for our doorway).
- 50 lengths of 89mm CLS timber
We managed to get a very good price for the whole lot, that is a fabulous as we get the benefit of having our material delivered using the standard truck with a crane to help unload the 12.7 tons of stuff! It shows that it pays to spend time shopping around even if you end up back at your local business (but you know what price to negotiate too) Phew!
19 October 2020
Oak Beadings and Wings Installed

After the glass was installed into the twelve windows, we spent the next two weeks putting on the Oak Beadings and Wings to finish off each window.
Each window has the normal four Oak Beadings (see Oak Beading Created) and each piece is held into place by a collection of special plastic clips. There are eight clips for each beading, plenty enough to rigidly hold the wooden finishing decorative strip in place against the glazing unit, squeezing the rubber seal up to the glass surface itself. We did have to do a little bit of trimming first, removing the excess sticking out bit of the glazing pad we 3D printed (see Manufacture of Glazing Support Pads) beyond the triple glazing units because they interfered with the Oak Beadings or would have done so if we hadn’t done anything. We just used a chisel to cut the plastic off next to the glass. The brown ones are the straight 90 degree regular clips and the black ones had the extra 6degree angle added to accommodate the slope of the sill. There were, in total, just under 400 clips to screw into place, using up nearly 800 stainless steel round headed screws.

Clips-in-place

Then each Oak Beading was trimmed to fit exactly each window in turn, using our chop saw and then our very sharp guillotine to slice off very thin slivers at exactly 45degree angles until each beading fitted in, nice and tight. The range of lengths were from 1613mm to 1616mm high and, for the larger windows, 1650mm to 1648mm in length. The narrower windows were pretty consistent at 1040mm and 830mm wide. We had to carefully hammer each strip down tight (using a shaped piece of oak with a rubber sheet material stapled to it) and work each beading down to the glass. The rubber seal was carefully teased straight before applying the final tap home.

First-window-bead-in-place

All-the-beading-on-a-Window

In our second week, we tackled the Oak Wings that goes on either sides of each window itself, to cover up the Larch cut ends. We had made them over the last twelve months during disruptions to other tasks and they have stood ready for a while since February this year. So at last, we proceeded to finish off the last stages of creating these Wings, by setting up the chop saw with the 6degree angle to slice the bottoms of each piece, making sure we had a set of “left” and “right” handed ones. We swopped around several pieces to select the best looking ones and finally arrived with a set of 12 pairs. The left over pieces (three of them) were bundled together, along with the remaining Oak Beading strips and stored away for any future needs like doing repairs.
Then we went around to each window in turn, and measured the precise height of the vertical sides, recording the left and right numbers. Using this data, we carefully sliced the length on each wing (after confirming the method on the first piece and testing outside on a window). Finally, we bevelled a small 45degree chamfer on the ends to clean up any splinters and also soften the visual joint when the Oak Wings are installed. The whole lot was vigorously sanded smooth.
The next task, a tricky one, was to place each piece into our template for making the T-slots we got in our window frames, and this time, using a router with a small 3mm diameter cutter, proceeded to make pilot holes for the locking stainless steel countersink headed screws. These screws provides the “key” to slide into the T-slot “holes” to lock each wing onto our window frames to form sideway flaring wings, shaped in the octagon scheme we got around the whole house.
The tests went well, making slight adjustments to our template and making lots of test pieces (short 6inch ones) and checking them outside on a window frame, before committed ourselves to doing all the other 24 pieces. That done, we could finally take each pair outside and install them to the eleven windows. The only one we didn’t do is the Q window that is in our Conservatory. In that room, the walls are left uncovered, no cladding etc. as we wanted to build the whole Conservatory first before deciding on the final wall coverings. So that pair of Oak Wings have been also stored away.
The wings were fixed into place with mushroom headed stainless screws, just like all the other screws fixing down the cladding and Oak Corners. We had to slice up lots of 25mm dowel pieces to fill in the gap between the wings and the Larch cladding, to make the whole thing very rigid and have plenty of air circulating around behind the timber pieces to keep them dry and free from wet rot.

Wings-on

Spacer-behind-the-wing

The last task was to smooth off the joint, that is overlapping with the frame of the window, using a mini planer and our new battery powered orbital palm held sander and then giving everything a good dose of timber oil, the first of many coats, to protect the timber from aging in the Sun and weather.

Windows-All-finished

That pretty much finishes everything we have to do to our exterior of our house (at last!!) and we can move on to starting to building the interior structure etc. The first job is to do the Entertainment Room, putting up its concrete sound-proofing shell.

17 October 2020
Ordered Concrete Beams and Blocks plus Sand and Cement for Entertainment Room

Today, for our Entertainment Room, we calculated the number of concrete blocks and concrete floor beams needed to build a sound reducing barrier around the walls and ceiling. There are twelve rows of standard dense concrete blocks, a lintel for going over the doorway and eleven 4 metre long concrete beams, the smallest one available (the 150mm by 120mm wide version) because it is just a false ceiling and not holding up any loads apart from itself. The concrete shell is approximately 5metres long by 4metres wide and 2.6metres high, just shy of the first floor joists.
The total number of blocks is around 635 but we ordered 650 to have some spares. We also ordered a ton bag of soft sand and eight bags of regular cement and a concrete lintel measuring 1200mm long, 100mm wide and 65mm thick to go over the doorway, it is rated at seven kilo-newtons (7kN/m) and we calculated that the block and beam ceiling will be 3.6kN per metre , loading over the 900mm wide doorway. That means a double safety factor, without us having to do anything special, just the minimum strength of the lintel we selected.
We have asked Jewson’s for a price on the whole job and we are waiting for it…

6 October 2020
Twelve Triple Glazing Units Arrives and All Are Installed
Very very early Friday, with all the alarms waking everyone, we staggered up to get ready for the arrival of the glass which could arrive as early as 8am!
What we are expecting is as follows:
- Nine large units, each weighing 118kg
- Two medium units weighing 75kg
- One slightly smaller one weighing 65kg.
We had our troupe here by 8am or soon after, under a very heavy cloudy sky and swirling winds. We passed the time having a much needed hot drink and fortunately, it wasn’t too long to wait. The van arrived at 8:47am.

The-Glass-arrives

12-Triple-glazing-units-waiting-to-be-unloaded

The-edge-of-a-Triple-glazing-unit

We carefully unloaded each unit, using four suction pad handles and transported each one on the adapted trolley to near each window position around the house. We put the glass on a narrow piece of polystyrene sheet to both protect the edge of the glass and keep it clean from the damp sandy soil.

Preparing-to-lift-a-unit-off-the-van

Moving-the-heavy-glass

Unit-ready-to-install

It took us 50 minutes to complete this task of moving well over 1.2 tons of glass. We had a much needed cup of tea and a slice of cake before resuming work!!

Then this is the big moment, will the glass fit?
And yes of course it did!
All of them!
We proceeded around the house, with one person inside taking off the wax protection paper off the sticky tape and four lifting up the glazing unit up and slotting it into the framework and then screwing several plastic beading clips against the glass to secure it into place.

Holding-unit-whilst-tape-is-uncovered

Glazing-clip-being-installed

Glazing-clip-installed

We started this process at 10:30am and got the last one done at 12:30pm.

We all had another much needed break to recover and enjoy lunch!!
So that concludes the installation of the Triple Glazing units, all Twelve of them! This makes us pretty much weather proof! Yahoo!
The final step to do next week, is to fix well over 300 of these plastic beading clips, cut the oak beading strips to length, mitre the corners, add the rubber seals and slide them onto the plastic clips. After that, we need to finish off doing the oak “wings” that covers up the ends of the larch cladding on either sides of each window. At this point we will be finished Phase 4 (The exterior of the house)!

Windows

Reflections
2 October 2020
Preparation of our Windows is all Done

Over the last ten days or so, we have been preparing for the arrival of our triple glazing units for our twelve windows in our main house. This was a mixture of taking down the temporary plastic polythene sheeting off the windows, removing the wooden strips that were holding them up. Then scrubbing and removing the old glue we had on the aluminium framework (from a failed attempt to attach polythene to the windows). Next was to paint the inside of the same aluminium surface black to stop it glittering in the middle of the window through the glass.

Another task was to construct a vehicle to help transport each glazing unit around the house to various locations. It took our small four wheel flatbed trolley and mounted a vertical padded framework to hold the glass while it was moved. This was sorely needed as the nine biggest glazing units weighed in at 120kg (265lbs or 19 stones ) each!

Glass-moving-rig

We also made a rain shield “tent” like structure just in case we were hit by the predicted Storm Alex that would be running across northern France and along the English Channel.

Rain-Protection

By Tuesday, we had some indication that our glass would be delivered Friday (2nd October) sometime, so we continued with the preparation task and went around the windows to stick on the double sided high strength security tape onto the aluminium strips, all ready for the glass. We left extra tails of covering paper which we folding to the inside of the window to allow easy removal after the windows was in-place. We decided that it was worth the risk of this getting wet in the frequent showers of rain we have been having all the while but it turned out ok because all the rain just came down straight and wasn’t blown into the windows etc. But we did discover that we were missing a roll of this sticky tape, we had originally ordered four 20metre rolls but couldn’t find the fourth one anywhere! We can’t prove that we were short-changed in the original order (because we ordered 6 months ago), so we had to dash to the computer and order an extra roll with an overnight morning delivery option. This was Tuesday lunch time!

Tape-Covering-Tails-

In the meantime, we took our homemade plastic glazing pads (see Manufacture of Glazing Support Pads), and went around sticking them on to the sill of each window, four of them for a large window and two for the smaller ones.

Frame-ready-for-glass

The drama with the double sided sticky tape was not over, because the courier had some issue and failed to deliver our roll before noon Wednesday as ordered. We phoned the supplier and they chased down the courier. We could see that our package was sitting in Norwich and had been since 6am Wednesday morning but it wasn’t until 1pm on Thursday before it finally arrived. Just typical that when we wanted a real speedy delivery, something goes wrong and when we don’t care, it always turns up promptly! Phew!
Anyway, we finished off the final three windows that afternoon and then went around with a straight metal “ruler” to test the level of the pads to makes sure that they were all flat and synchronised and did some swopping out of one or two pads for thicker ones and in one case a couple of thinner ones.
All is now ready for the glass!
The final concluding piece of information is that we learnt that the glass will be delivered first thing Friday morning, between 8am and 10am. We informed our cohort of helpers of this shocking news and set our alarms for 6am – Eek!!

1 October 2020
Sun Shield Over Corridor Removed and Two Fence Panels repaired After Storm

Today, Sunday, under a very grey sky, we got up on to the roof of our temporary living quarters and rolled up our Sun Shield tarpaulin covering over our long corridor and put it away for this year.
We did a quick inspection of the rest of the roof, including the garage roof, to make sure that it is looking good and solid.
Plus also, we put in fresh batteries into our weather station transmitter as it was reporting a low battery indication.
After that, we went over to our temporary wooden fence along the Loke to repair two panels that had been blown down by the storm we had a couple of days ago. The rain gauge reported a total of 50mm of water fallen out of the sky! Fortunately, it was not all concentrated in one sharp downpour but spread right across the whole day. Phew!
Anyway, we screwed some pieces of 2 by 1 battens (recycling so old pieces used for the dunking tank) to reinforce the broken vertical edges of the panels and slid them back in between their posts. This time, we also screwed the panels to the posts to stop them falling out of their brackets.

Repaired-Loke-fence

That concludes the 2 hours of Sunday chores!

27 September 2020
Creating the Automation Development Environment

This second stream of work have been tackling the long-term goals of developing the large range of electronic devices, controllers, sub-systems and management services.
Shaun has been building up a Development Environment to aid us in writing, analysing, implementing, testing and building finished products that will be integrated into the fabric of our house. One of the tool is an editor that will make it so much easier for Shaun to write, compile and test lots of code, without having to rely on the vast majority of the off-the-shelf offerings that uses all visual presentation with mouse controls and hardly no keyboard awareness.
It is an opportunity to get this process started while we wait for the the glass to come, and the Editor is coming along very nicely, with a highly configurable input control and language layout of the different types of source code that needs to be written and compiled.

Stephen has also been working on the Electronic designs, by looking at various software to run the microcomputers in these devices.

26 September 2020
Manufacture of Glazing Support Pads

We resumed work after our so-called holiday on two separate streams of work, one to develop the automation infrastructure and Development Environment (see Creating The Automation Development Environment) and this stream where Stephen needed to manufacture specialised plastic pads to support the glazing units. Our units are triple glazing with 6mm thick glass separated by two 16mm wide gaps filled in with Argon gas. Hence, the total thickness of our glazing units are 50mm. We couldn’t find these to buy on the web and we had a special requirement because our window sills have a unique shape. We wanted the slope to go under the glass a small distance to ensure that any rain water will be encouraged to run out again if any got in or leaked pass the glazing beading strips.

Window bottom cross section

There is a flat area of 35mm wide and then the slope starts which goes all the way to the front of the sill, this means that our plastic pads had to grow thicker to accommodate the slope (The Pink bit in the above picture).
Here enters our 3D printer!!

The-3D-Printer

We had our 3D printer for a few years now but it is the first time we are using ABS type of plastic, ABS being a much tougher material and also offers a very long lifetime resilience, especially for the outdoor environment of rain, sunshine, insects and dust!

Stephen started to do some printing with ABS but it was not very successful, the plastic was not flowing well out of the nozzle and as the printer has to work at higher temperatures to melt this type of plastic, Stephen decided that certain parts of the printer needed upgrading.
The first thing to improve is the heat retention of the base plate that all the plastic objects are created upon. It is normally heated but we found that it wasn’t getting the temperature high enough to keep the ABS plastic steadily hot so that it does not warp by cooling too quickly. The improve this we glued the heater to the base plate (it was just placed against it before) and a piece of double corrugated cardboard was placed on the underside to insulate and retain the heat longer. It works very nicely now!

Improved-build-plate

The second upgrade was to the roll holders at the back of the machine, where the plastic filament rolls are stored. The large rolls are quite heavy and the weight was causing higher friction which gave problems to the feeder motor that was trying to pull the filament into the melting chamber. The solution was to make a conical plastic holder with a ball race bearing fitted in it. We printed two new pieces, using our 3D printer of course, fitted the bearing and threaded both on a rod with wing nuts.

New-spool-support-cone-with-bearing

New-filament-spool-holder

In the meantime, we had ordered a replacement all-metal spring loaded mechanism to improve the grip strength of the feeding motor, the old one being plastic and unsprung and we felt that the quality of feeding the filament into the nozzle was important to maintain a good pressure and flow of melted plastic.
The new extruder needed a lot of fiddling, filing, buying longer bolts etc. to get it to work well.

New-Extruder-motor-unit

The final part of puzzle was realising that the temperature of the extruder nozzle was not as hot as the machine was saying it was (It should have been 230°C and was actually below 200°C). I added extra insulation around the heater but it did not help so I just told the machine to heat it to 270°C to get an actual 230°C temperature.

Now we could start printing in earnest and we successfully printed a support, but we had parts where we still weren’t getting proper extrusion, so I slowed the printing speed down and got much better results. But each pad was taking 55 minutes to print. This was mainly because we were printing layers only 0.2mm high (50 layers for the print), I increased the layer height but found I couldn’t extrude fast enough with the fine 0.4mm nozzle so I bought a 0.8mm nozzle. This allowed a print time of just 20 minutes with 0.5mm layers, so I could print 3 supports at the same time in about 1 hour.

The-final-printed-supports

Printing-spacers-1

Printing-spacers-2

We only print supports under the actual glass panes and leave hollow elsewhere. So after 2 weeks of fiddling and upgrading we had all the supports made (with a few spares).

All-the-supports-printed

25 September 2020
While We Wait for the Glass!

The last two weeks have been a break away from our House Building project! We decided to have a complete change of scene while we wait for the glass window units to be manufactured and delivered (target date is the week beginning the 28th September).

BUT ..

It wasn’t a complete removal from the actual building work processes themselves! We went to help our Uncle to enlarge the door to their under stair storage area. A case of cutting out concrete breeze blocks, a solid steel reinforced lintel, inserting of a new steel lintel, wooden framework and a new door! All filled, smoothed, painted and polished!

New-Cupboard

Inside

12 September 2020