Saturday 18 August 2012

'One has to sip one's cider...'

- for 'tis too strong for quaffing at 7.5%. I'm referring to batch 2 the John Downie single variety.
'One has to sip one's cider... one has to stick one's little finger out...'

meanwhile -
this is my no1 cider fan's 1956 Landrover:



Tony has owned this series 1 for 50 years!

Thursday 9 August 2012

3:4:5 - 'tis good - 'twas good

Well I had a pic of laying out the frame but just lost it...

As I've only got a old engineer's square I fell back on a bit of Pythagorus - all good in principal but tricky to get right with a sliding steel rule... still, best of a bad job and the four bolts are in now securing the top beams to the uprights...

Er, two cock ups though:
1st was relying on one of the existing holes in the section - oops, too tight to get a socket on. Though not an insurmountable problem it would have been prudent to have given a bit more brain before the brawn...
2nd was marking one hole wrong - then even worse, drilling it to 12mm. If I'd checked it at pilot size I could have saved a lot of messing...
fair does, it's a long time since I got a grade 1 in metalwork and only GCSE at that!

Ah well, cider time... the very last bottle of 2010's Batch 7 - unless I've missed a box...

Monday 6 August 2012

More trees...

As it came on to rain again last week a local told me about some crab apple trees he'd remembered seeing. Rained off as I was I ventured down the lane and onto the footpath as advised. Sure enough, in the hedgerow apple leaves in abundance, but sadly no apples. Making my return I noticed a few trees bearing fruit off to my left in an overgrown field - surely the remains of an orchard and found I counted 7 trees with fruit. Too large to be crabs, but an interesting find nontheless and well worth the soaking from the long wet grass.

Sunday 5 August 2012

Progress is slow

though any progress is good...

So, all steel cut to length for new steel press frame. It came on to rain later but I stuck with it...




A & B are top beams, C & D lower beams. E is the lower support cross beam - F being the leftover to make a sliding upper beam.


The observant will notice that there is no provision for 'legs' to hold the setup upright... Unfortunately relations with the customer who supplied the steel took a turn for the worse (win some, lose some - get punched by just the one so far in 36 years of day job...), so I need to find some bits from somewhere to make some legs/stands...
The idea is to bolt it all together rather than weld, to help keep the whole thing more portable. Marking out to keep it square will be down to careful measurement...
Dimensions: Overall height: 6'2" Internal width: 33"
Lower crossbeam intended to be adjusable for height.
Fingers crossed as I ain't no engineer!