Workbench update

What's been happening in Utrainia this week?

Corner module #1

After making the skeleton of the first corner module in record time, I ran into a bit of a road block with the bridge. I realised that it was too short and too tall, and would take a bit of work to get it curved. What I really needed was an extra bridge tower to make the chasm sides a bit less steep.

So rather than just biting the bullet, ordering an extra span and waiting a couple of weeks for it to arrive, I decided I would make my own. The girders were easily cast, however the A frames for the bridge towers were a different story. I had to make a two part mold, and then inject the resin in at one end, using a combination of gravity and pressure to distribute it throughout the mold. Second attempt went reasonably well, good enough for my purposes:

A lot of flashing to clean up, and a few bubbles in places, but hopefully once painted and assembled it won't be visible.

The girder production line is going well however, and I have been using my excess resin to cast window assemblies for a sky scraper:

The sky scraper will look a bit like the Millenium Hotel in Christchurch, with its distinctive small window assemblies.

Saw bench

Since I got my mitre saw, its been living on a portable work table, clamped to the top. This is handy, but I figured a proper bench for it, with the cutting plane at the same height as my workbench, would be better.

So a couple of hours with the drill and saw and a few bits of scrap lumber later...

Huge improvement.

Garage clean up

Now that Utrainia is expanding, I need a place to put it. It occurred to me if I had a really good clean up, made a place for all the boxes and timber to go, organised a few other things, I would gain half a garage.

So Saturday morning I headed off to The PlyGuy and came back with $40 of MDF and dimensional timber. I made up a false ceiling to make a place for all the boxes to live, especially the massive television boxes. This went together pretty well, and by the end of Saturday I had all the boxes nicely slotted in above my head. The glorified shelf is cunningly attached to the existing walls without a single screw, just by resting on things, or hanging off the I beam that runs through the middle. So when we move, it'll just take 30 minutes with the screw driver and there'll be nothing left.

Carpeting the garage

Come Sunday I cleaned and vacuumed the now vacant half of the garage, then headed off and bought a bunch of desk lamps and 20W cool white energy efficient lamps. These give a great clean white light and are easily positioned wherever you need them. In the process I managed to crush one of them with my bare hand and am now nursing a rather sore thumb :(

After that I headed off a couple of minutes up the road to a shed that is chocked full of surplus carpet. The guy that owns it runs a carpet laying business, so is always having to cart away old carpet. It's pretty expensive to dump so he just stockpiles it, free for the taking. So Rachel and I had a quick rummage and found 2 larger matching, relatively clean square of carpet, perfect for my needs.

A few hours of trimming, sweeping and vacuuming later and I had the carpet down. There are a couple of mysterious fuschia stains, but nothing to worry about. The carpet is the perfect size too.

The new space is about 6m by 2m, enough space for 14 modules! So Utrainia can do plenty of expanding yet, though I think I'll have my work cut out for me making that many modules. In the meantime the garage is looking great with all the extra, nicely organised room.

So that is the latest gossip from Utriania. In the coming week I hope to make some progress with my corner module and start forming the polystyrene landscape that will comprise it. Watch this space!