This afternoon, we resumed the assembling of the steel framework, by examining the problem of the ends of the two I Beams (Number Two and Four – nearer the garage end) being a little lower than expected, or perhaps the Number Four Leg is slightly too high for when we tried on Saturday to put on the short I beam Number Three, it would not interlock into the ends of I Beams Two and Four. This could mean that the concrete slab level is not quite at the same level as the Legs. We will analyse this further.
But today, we wanted to see and were trying to lift the ends up to “bend” the I beam back up again, even if it is only temporary so we can get the last short I beam in, but when we tried to do this using a racket winch tied onto our wooden crane leg, we could only make it move up 5mm or so before the rope was giving alarming creaking noises!! Oops! That’s Plan A out of the window!
Instead, while we ponder on that problem, we decided to haul up seven of the Cross Spars that go on top of the I beams, going from one side to the other side. These Spars do three jobs
- They grip the edges of the I Beams stopping them twisting along it’s length,
- The upwards piece holds up the ridge beam of the skylight and
- The lower part holds up part of the ceiling.
We started at the end where the legs were (number Three and Five) and got the two towers moved and align so we could install two Cross Spars each time between moving the towers. We hauled up the said two Cross Spars and laid them on our platform and after throwing over the rope with a carabiner attached on the end, we clipped it into a bolt hole and gently pulled it across from one tower to the other, spanning across between the two side of the I beams. This Spar was then bolted down with two 12mm bolts in each end and all was fine.
In fact, we continued to successfully install a further 6 of our Cross Spars, moving the tower along a bit to do two more each time, going towards the Great Room end.
7-Tie-Bars-in-place
We have two more left to do on the garage end but only after we have solved the problem of putting on the short I Beam in place after we have lifted up the droop. We will tackle that problem tomorrow.