Stumping

Today we kicked off straight away with the stumps that we had initially started yesterday. We put in 26 stumps in the ground. We started off by placing one stump in at the perfect height and made it out datum point for the laser level, that way later we could use the laser level to make the other stumps the same height. Our datum stump was 148mm above our string line level.

Greg and I teamed up to put in the stumps because it made it quite a bit easier to get a good level position with the stump. Everytime we put a stump in the ground we made sure the 148mm mark was either equal with or above the string line. When it was above the string line level we simply marked it with the laser level to saw off later. We had a 20mm tolerance with regards to getting the stump close to the string line, and in hindsight it was probably a little too much.

Once all the stumps were in we got the laser level and the staff and marked each stump with the datum height. When we had marked all the stumps we then used a combination square to square off the lines for cutting later. This was a pretty simple and easy process and was done fairly quickly.

After this we set up two circular saws and began cutting along the square lines we had drew in previously. The base plate was not square with the blade, eventhough it read 0 degrees, the saws had been damaged so were out. We used simple squares and squared up the blade with the base plate. Once we had this sorted out we could then actually saw correctly. To cut the stumps to the right height it involved getting down on your knees and using the saw to cut horizontally. Also the pencil lines did not show up very well on the CCA H4 treated pine so this made it hard to make accurate cuts.

We then moved onto the bearers, and with our small plan there weren't too many. We set them up on the drop saw while using a rolling stand because the lengths of timber were quite long. We cut the bearers out of 100 x 75mm rough sawn. We mounted and hammered in a couple of the smaller bearers by hand. We also noticed that one of the bearers had a bow in it so we corrected that and there was another bearer that had a substantial twist in it. We didn't get around to nailing it so we'll just have to wait and see how it will turn out tomorrow.

All in all i enjoyed today because we had a chance to just get stuck in perform to the best of our abilities. Paul gave us less supervision so we were able to nut out problems just amongst our group, which i feel is a better way to learn and also helps us develop a kind of specific group dynamic. We also got to talk about a whole heap of different subjects whilst we working to keep ourselves amused.