Heyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy, visual progress. Thanks to Nick for his comment. I was unaware that the leader of Buckwheat Zydeco had passed. In the middle of BFN here I get little news. I'll feature him next week because I'm finishing up with the song string I created in my madness. I hope You both enjoyed it. Right now I have Buckwheat on the earphones.
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In preparation for our pod lift, Ben had to glue rubber pads (the black stuff) on the faces of two beams (Mast and #3). If the pod moves, this will cushion the movement fore and aft.
My side project for the week was hatch hinges. No, you just don't screw them in, dammit! I bought a bunch of hatch gasket (onomatopoeia?.......alliteration??) material. It is 5/8" and can compress, as a general rule. 25-50%. So 50% of 5/8". which is 0.625 inches equals a maximum of 0.3125 inches and 25% of 5/8" equals 0.15625. No, that's wrong......oh, never mind. Sheesh, I made some 3/8 inch spacers to hold the hatch high enough to give the gasket some compression room.
Then screwed the hinges in with the correct spacing. Except for the final one........more later.......probably.
So the time arrived in the great timetable in the sky to actually raise the pod to the skies and place it it it's proper position until the end of time or whatever comes sooner. Three great minds (stooges ) came together and decided a procedure. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, lift it with ratchet straps and come-alongs???? Sure, why not? What could possibly go wrong??
Ratchet straps through the pod drain holes. We dragged beam 2 into position to act as the lifting point for the pod.
Sloooowly jack up the pod uniformly until..............
We could place some safety saw horses to keep it from falling far. Good thing, a ratchet strap broke. We proceeded with extreme caution, this was dangerous stuff!!
Nine saw horses at the next level!
When the saw horses became too short, we added safety by additional support (yellow ratchet straps) to keep the safety redundancy in place. Good thing.......a come-along broke. Again. nothing catastrophic. We moved the stairs under the pod for the final push..
We scooted the pod over the mast beam. Then we jacked up the pod high enough so we could slide beam 3 into it's place and lower the pod into it's proper position.
Then we put the pins in beam three to punctuate the process.
Next comes tweaks (not twerks) to the correct placement of pod and beam. There's a video in there somewhere. Ben's in charge of that. Subscribe to our videos, so I don't have to tell you about them.
With the pod in place, we are presented with a new head banging opportunity. We generally walk around like the downtrodden with our head down and our eyes on the ground, so Ben painted the ground. I hit my head a couple times already (The downtrodden can't read).
Ben added foam to the edge....................................... still hit my head.
So, Friday morning 6:30 AM, having not checked the weather, we were again putting in hatches and covering tools in the driving rain.
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The happy wet dimwits!
So, with 3 hatches going as smoothly as possible with this process, the final one had to have a thin spacer glued to the hatch coming so the hinges would align. Something always goes wrong...............
We fixed the come-along. We threw the busted ratchet strap away. What a week!
The Music ♪: The Devil Makes Three "Statsboro Blues"
Now that you're all Statsboro black and blues.............
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