I will apologize ahead of time for the rambling I am about to compose. It has been a busy weekend and I know that I speak for everyone involved when I admit, I am exhausted. All weekend long I had a hard time gauging our progress at the park. It would seem as if we were hitting on all cylinders with many things getting completed, when I would turn around and find something unexpected that needed to be fixed and set us back hours to take care of. Even though we did not finish as much as we had scheduled to by Sundays end, I sit here now very impressed with what was accomplished.
We finally removed all of the formwork from our concrete walls, but not without calling for some help from Ervin Jeffers of JMO Woodworks who offered his chainsaw abilities on the final two stubborn forms. Once we exposed all of the “keyways” it was just a matter of dropping in our Meranti wood structures before we could move on to cutting steel. If only it was that easy… We found that the wood needed to be further milled down to fit in between the concrete walls and that there were some problems with the bench seat supports that needed to be rebuilt. It seemesd as though we made no headway on Saturday which was frustrating, but the students took the wood back to the shop and had it ready to install Sunday mormning.
It took all of Sunday’s daylight to get all of the wood trusses set and to measure for the steel louvers. I am finally starting to see the fruits of all of our labor which is truly satisfying. With the trusses in place the project is really starting to take shape.
The next step is to cut, torque, tab and drill all 156 steel louvers to be delivered to the galvanizer by Wednesday. A lot to do in the next couple of days, but I think that we are all getting a second wind with Thanksgiving break in sight.