Yesterday

After a hard days work at the sawmill nobody had the energy to update this blog. It is a little late but I’ll fill you all in.

The first day of work went pretty well. In the morning we tested out different joining methods. Below you can see the two main types of joint we have decided to use. These are both pretty quick and easy to do while providing good strength.

  

The for the rest of the day we set about building the first of our screens.

 

All in all it was a pretty successful day.

Sawmill: Day Two

Our first official build day got off to a good start and after a bit of experimentation we developed a system to construct our screens. It goes a little something like this….

measure-check-draw-check-saw-check-chisel-check-drill-check-screw-check…

(repeat 15 or so times)

… DONE!

and then it’s time to start the next one.

 6 inches of wood!

 Rachel ‘head-marker’

 mystery arms sawing!

 daniel chiselling!

bob the builder! 

team whirl! team work!

The first day at the sawmill.

It wasn’t quite as productive as we had planned it to be. We spent the morning going over our design (again) and calculating how much wood we needed to buy. Because of our budget we have had to go for the cheaper option of Oriented Strand Board (OSB) for the slats. This wood is made up of scraps and off-cut of wood which are glued together under high heat and pressure giving it pretty good strength. I think this wood will look quite good once it is set in a well constructed frame.

The trip to get the wood in the afternoon was a great success. In just under two hours, me, Dave and Scott managed to spend well over half of our budget on chopped-up trees. We even got the OSB chopped into 72 100mm width strips before we bought it. I think that has probably saved us about 2 days of tedious cutting.

This is what £420 worth of wood looks like.

 Tomorrow a few of us are meeting at the sawmill at 9.30 to start building. We will probably spend a little while in the morning practicing some of our joints on some scraps of wood. (its been a while since I did a lap joint) Then, once we are competent, we will have a crack at one of our screens.

Wish us luck… 

Q:How many mad cyclists can you get on a Monday morning tackling the sizeable Eccy Road South incline?

A: 3…Andy, Molly, Martin…and they beat the Peugeot 306 (comfortably too!)

The return journey definitely makes up for the outward toil and leg pain…on some downhills I was going faster than the traffic (and that was only freewheeling!)

Q: How many people can you fit in a Peugeot 306?….

…..A: 6 (if you take Daniel!)

After Team Whirl’s clever and economic use of car space (or not so clever if your name is Daniel…) we eventually made it to the Sawmill to discuss the final designs for the installation with Handspring. A long discussion about different timber types, sizes and prices ensued…..ending with the discovery that we needed 66 slats!!! Andy and Dave bravely volunteered to accompany Scot to buy and transport all of the timber (which I’m sure they’ll write a post about for the benefit of our avid readers), whilst the rest of the groups split into teams and returned to the warmth of the Tower to discuss proper working drawings and the final document.

The construction mangeress is now doubting whether she made the right decision to volunteer herself for the post…..my suggestion… copious amounts of tea that’ll sort her out!

Stay cool people

Heather

Ooh…the build-up!

Yes, some might say its bravery, others might say stupidity…but I would argue that as the Whirl has been one of the most exciting projects I have been involved in, it has made me curious enough to nominate myself as the Construction Manager-ess! Fear not my follow team members I say. After our great team work on Friday on our final 1:10 design model, I have faith…faith! Tomorrow should be indeed a day of realisation to us all on how much exactly we have cut-out for ourselves, what with all our screens of hundreds of slats! On the plus side, I think we are all ready for it, which should make things run smoothly tomorrow with design finalisation at the Sawmill. My only concern at the moment is our genius plan to camp in the woods on the night before the event! Is it really going to happen?!!

Check out all that wood.

This morning we went for a quick trip to Arnold Laver to check out what sort of wood we could get our hands on and how much it was going to cost.

We discovered that wood comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Incuding the shapes and sizes that we need. Hopefully when we go back on Monday and buy loads of it we will be able to get a little bit of a discount!

This is the sort of wood we are going to use to make the slats in our screens.

Construction begins on Monday!

Oh the anticipation! We will be working with Handspring Design at the Sawmill in Eccleshall woods. The design layout is almost finalised, hopefully typical construction details can be agreed on Monday morning. Boots, old clothes, mis-matching gloves, thermal base layers, woolly hats…we’re going to be a trendy bunch over the next 2 weeks! Expecting to eat a lot more calories…maybe should start having greasy fry-ups every morning?

The basic construction principle for the main ‘heart’ space (made up of a series of timber screens) is to contruct a series of timber frames which then can have cladding applied. The idea is that each frame will be structurally independent so that they can be transported to site as flat panels, then joined together and arranged on site.

Lighting experiments

As you can see, it gets rather dark on site after sunset…

Experiments were carried out on Thursday evening on site to test the effectiveness of various battery operated lights, candles, and paper bag lanterns. Lighting is intended to be used both as a low level navigational device and to light certain key features in the narrative journey.

  

A busy day for “Team Whirl”

This morning it was all hands to the studio to prepare for a 12 o’clock meeting with Ruth and Prue. It was pretty nerve racking stuff. If they didn’t like what we were planning at this stage then we would have been up the creek without a paddle.

First impressions seemed good. A few sketches and images went down very well and we seem to have resolved our pod issues. Everyone seems pretty happy with the glowing box in the tree.

 In the afternoon we all headed down to the site to layout a mock up of our screens and to get a feel for what the spaces will be like at full scale. It was a good exercise to do at this stage. It gave us a better idea of the spaces we will be creating and how they might be used.

This is where the back wall will go

Heather and Juliet testing the plan.

We were on the site until well after sunset. This gave us a chance to play with some torches and generally see what it was like in the woods at night.

Following today’s exercise in the woods we have a few minor planning decisions to make and a few creases to iron out but on the whole we seem to be on track to start building on Monday… This calls for a celebration. I’m going to get a beer out of the fridge and watch some TV.