Muffins for Tea
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The team met as usual on May 3rd and were helped along by a batch of muffins provided by Mrs Dave. The weather was overcast in the morning but the clouds cleared around midday and the sun shone fiercely.
Dave, Max and Colin arrived ready to tackle the replacement of the support for the inner main bearing, complete with jacks, straps and timber wedges. The top photo shows the shaft jacked up and restrained and the jacks can just be made out glinting blue through the hole that should be solid timber.
This task managed to involve everybody at some point during the morning with Headley providing muscle, Martyn providing chainsaw skills and Richard taking pictures. The new piece of timber is solid oak recovered from building work at a team member’s home and only required a socket for the bearing to be cut into one side. One chainsaw, one chisel and a mallet took care of that and the timber was soon in place. The second picture shows the bearing back in place securely on top of a sound piece of timber.
The whole job was completed by early afternoon and work resumed on the re-plating of the waterwheel. This process is still as noisy as ever but there is now a good proportion of the wheel that is fully populated with buckets. Colin and Headley seem to be getting quicker as they get into the swing of things and it won’t be too long before they have to make some more buckets. They still drop tools now and again, but Richard was happy to have an excuse to go paddling in the tailrace as he had got a bit hot and dusty cleaning bricks.
John wasn’t with us today so Richard managed to get ahead of him with a supply of bricks. When John returns he will find enough bricks to complete all the steps that have been started so far.
When he wasn’t using the chainsaw, Martyn continued fitting the window frame and its trim. With some help from Colin and Max at various times through the day the glass was all in place and secure by the time we went home.
As ever, the discussions around the table at break times were lively although a little muted at times as we tackled the generous supply of muffins from Mrs Dave. Today we were joined by Al and Richard, on site to prepare the PA system for the upcoming hillclimb. We are pretty sure they didn’t know about the muffins before they arrived!
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