This morning, we completed the task of extending our mobile scaffolding tower and it is now has the capacity to provide a 4.8m (16feet) length of work platform by 1.2m (4feet) wide. The edges all has the same safety kick board and we have loaded eight huge concrete blocks (each weighing about 25kg), positioned at the bottom of the metal tower, four at each end near the wheels.
Extended-mobile-scaffold-1
Extended-mobile-scaffold-2
It is very stable now and we cannot tipped it over, even with both of us trying hard by hanging our weight off the end of the platform!!!
But we did hit a snag, we couldn’t roll it along the ground! The ground was too soft and the wheels kept digging in! We then used narrow strips of plywood to aid the wheels to roll smoothly but discovered that we had slightly bent the threaded rod that allows us to adjust the height to compensate for uneven ground levels (which we had done – of course!) and the 20mm diameter rod wasn’t thick enough to cope with the dynamic forces involved in us yanking and pulling the tower along in the dirt and getting it up onto the plywood. Oh Blow, What a Pain! So we ordered another threaded rod but this time it is 30mm thick and twice as strong in tensile strength too. That will come in a day or so.
In the meantime, after lunch, we started working on designing and building a template to allow us to cut the slots into the Fascia boards to hold the base layer of the guttering channel. We think it will work if it “hooks” over the Fascia, has four evenly spaced out “arms” to hook behind the Fascia board and can be clamped down once the slope angle has been achieved. The slope angle will probably use a long bolt through a block of wood and that will allow us to adjust the height of the template on the Fascia boards at each end and thus achieve the slope we want.
Gutter-base-routing-template-started
We will finish that tomorrow and then we can start trying it out along the back of the building while we wait for the new threaded rod to arrive.