This morning, we finished off the final section of the inner wall footplate that had wet mortar from yesterday. All concrete screws are now tightened down, including 3 of them that has lost their grip so we glued them into place using Polyurethane glue.
Then, we marked out on an old cloth measuring tape, on the blank white side, all the regular position of each leg of the wall, which repeats every 612mm spacing. This allowed us to slide back and forth the tape on each segment of the wall and get a precise alignment of each window or windows, depending on the length of the wall segment. We did this all the way around the whole house and completed this just before lunch.
After lunch, we got out the compressed air hose, the yellow tank (which has multiple connections which independent controllable air output points), the nail gun and the bottle of glue. But we only discovered that the glue bottle wouldn’t hold the pressure (a very low pressure of 1.5 bars) due to an old rubber seal. Then, the feeder tube was weakened half way down and it looks as if the glue had attacked the aluminium metal and made it weak. Then, we discovered that the flexible hose coming from the bottle was blocked and it took full pressure of 8 bars to shove out whatever it was causing the blockage (it was old glue that has gone “funny” and very thick!). So after repairing the glue bottle, putting in a new plastic feeder tube to go down inside the bottle to the bottom of the liquid glue, repaired the rubber seal and reconnected the flexible hose, it was all working again at last!
Pnumatic-Glue-dispenser-
But it was getting late in the afternoon so we decided to test the glue with two bits of old timber, just to make sure the old glue was still working properly after sitting around for 5 years.
In the meantime, we got out our circular battery saw and a tape measure and went around cutting up a heap of 89mm CLS timber to form the second layer, stopping and starting at each door and window. There are 12 windows and 3 doors.
Next-layer-of-external-footplates-cut
Tomorrow, we will nail, screw and glue all these pieces into place. We will do a third layer immediately afterwards, overlapping any joints to reinforce the strength of the wall and then slice the required leg grooves afterwards, as there are many short pieces so we thought it would be easier and less wasteful if we went around with a template and cut the 38mm wide grooves there and then using a flat bottom tungsten cutting bit in our router.