Sunday 6 November 2011

A walk round the garden this afternoon

I had twenty minutes spare this afternoon, and the sun was shining.  So, armed annoyingly with the less good camera, I set off into the garden to see what I could find.  Leaves, mostly, and the odd berry.
 








Archimedes screw update - sluice gate arrives.

Last time I brought you up to speed to the point where the screw had arrived (all 8 tonnes of it), and we had successfully negotiated the 1 mile journey from the A36 down the hill across fields and along tracks, to its resting place in the ready-prepared concrete cradle:
Since then, the bearings have been connected up, and a shed built on top of the concrete platform in which the gear mechanism and control unit are housed.  This is seriously solid kit.
 The shed:
You might recall that there was a large tree root which needed to be removed from the mill leet wall before repairs to it could be made.  This was the result (it came out with quite a bit of wall attached - all of which will be reused in some project or other).
The enormous 360 excavator gave the remaining stones a hefty shove back into the hole created by the tree roots.
And then shuttering was applied in order to create a concrete replacement to the top half of this wall, which will withstand attack by fast flowing 'torpedo' tree-roots and such much better than the old stone wall would have done.
More shuttering props are added:
 The results were excellent, and the plan is to tie this into the new beam (look back at previous updates from first weeks of the project) on the weir to give greater strength on the corner by the piles blocking the leet in the image below.
Some significant site tidying went on at this point, and we suffered from our first rain delays.  Fortunately this coincided in part with a delay on the arrival of the all-important sluice gates.  In the image below you can see the sluice gates have been installed finally, and the shed has also received its cladding which tones it down a bit.
We have been astonished at the speed that the entire project has been moving along.  I am touching copious quantities of wood as I write this, but hopefully all will run smoothly for the final fortnight.  Boy, will be pleased to see the project completed - not only because we are excited to generate the electricity, but furthermore because we are experiencing some pretty determined river flows just now, and a flood this month really would set things back!

This was the river taken this morning: