Revenge of the Setting out of the Building Perimeter

In a galaxy far far away....
Paul joins up with the rebel outfit of the Dale Alcock all star apprentices and attempts to flout the evil plans of the despicable House plan from hell. During the running battles of the North oval battle field, Renna went missing and the team was left fledgling under the might of slaughterous string lines. Also Paul, Mike and Greg were struck down by back pain and could not fight off the amassing wooden stakes army. Rob and Rhys had to regather the teams falling morale for one last revenge against the setting out the building perimeter.
First of all today we headed out in the morning to the North oval. Before we left, we gathered the tools we would need to adequately set out string lines to a building plan. The tools we had were Rip saws, claw hammers, sledge hammers, spirit levels, dumpy levels, a staff, cordless drills, roof carpentry squares and string lines. We also collected 3 stacks of 1" x 2" x 2.4 to make the hurdles.
First of all we picked a main starting point, which we hammered in a small picket into the ground, placed a nail in the middle of the picket, and then placed the tripod directly over the top of the nail using a plumb bob hanging from beneath the dumpy level. We initially had the dumpy level at 0 degrees so that we could simply rotate the dumpy level 62 degrees to guage our other boundary line. So after we had done these two steps we had two boundary lines, one which was going to be our straight edge for the house foundation, and another at 62 degrees from the straight edge.
We then measured 7 metres directly perpendicular to the 62 degree line, and then ran our 8.390 measurement square to the straight line, until it met up with the parallel line to the 62 degree line. This is too hard to describe without a diagram and a detailed step by step description.
To set up our two main lines perfectly at a right angle to one another, we employed the 345 technique, which is simply using the lengths 3 metres and 4 metres down each length of string, and then using the pythagoras thereom to see if our diagonal between those two points made 5 metres. So 3m across one line, 4m across the other, and if the lines are square then the diagonal length between them should be 5 metres.
When we roughly had our starting pickets in the ground, which were only roughly staked in, we placed our hurdles around each corner roughly 500mm away from the rough stakes. After we had 4 corners of hurdles in we used the staff and the dumpy level to mark out our level on each on the sides of the vertical hurdle pickets. Each picket had a different height marked on it, but when all viewed together they were all perfectly level because the ground had a slight decline to the left.
When we measured the length (12470) and the width (8390), we measured at roughly where the lines intersected one another, which in the end turned out the wrong way to do it, because the strings would stretch and move throwing our measurements out. This caused a bit of frustration amongst the group, but was easily solved when we measured from fixed screws on the hurdles, as they did not move and we could get some accurate parallel lines happening.

At the end, once we were satisfied that we had two parallel lines measuring 8390 and two other parallel lines measuring 12470, that made a large rectangle, we measured the two diagonals to see if our rectangle was square. I calculated on a calculator, using pythagoras, that the diagonals should measure 15030, and with a little tweaking our diagonals measured the same.

I enjoyed todays excersise as it was a challenging one, but it felt like we had a few too many people involved doing the same job, so when a couple of people were figuring something out, some one else would already be doing the job and do it wrong. We also didn't have a set leader, so the person doing the calculations and making the problem solving decisions was continually changing. This meant that the way we going about the project kept changing so mistakes were over looked, so then we had to back track occassionally. During this project things did become frustrating and tense but it was good to see no one throwing in the towel or losing it and bringing the rest of the team down haha although it would've been funny.