I was out on site by 7.15 am and left at 6.30 pm.

Firstly I needed to replace two of the fine retic lines as I found that these were blocked on Thursday.

Then I worked on the top plates for the front veranda columns.

I had already cut a 160 square plate for the corner last week. I cut another two out of the length of 10mm thick plate and then also some 225 mm x 80 mm lengths for the 4 intermediate posts.

I really wanted to get on with the posts on Ross's side but while I had part of the jig in postion for one of the front columns I wanted to finish this one off.

I measured and cut the length of 75 mm SHS that I needed and welded on its top plate.

Then I tack welded it to the screw pile and removed and packed away the jig.

Next I needed to take a very careful look at the draftsman's plan for the column spacing down Ross's side.

I eventually twigged that he was using a standard spacing of 2675 between centres, with the carport entrance being equivalent to 3 bays.

Having deduced this I then calculated the displacement of each column along the side.

Then I set up the jig for the second from back corner column.

This took a bit longer as the jig needs to be mounted in thin air - so there is a temporary piece of PFC 150 that needs to be clamped on to give it a landing.

At the moment I have a 9 mm discrepancy between the physical jig and the laser measurements for the height of the column. I will need to repeat all of these measurements again. However - it started raining at this point and I did not want to expose the laser level to moisture - so hopefully I can do this on Sunday.

While it was raining, I stripped down to just a pair of shorts and went through an exercise with the installed back veranda column.

I had told Ross that there were two columns that I need to grind 2mm off to average out a reasonable set of levels.

He suggested I run a string line across the top to confirm this independently of the laser level.

I tried this, but I am sure that, no matter how tight I pull the string, there is a drop of almost 10 mm in the string in the middle of the 13 metre run.

Sunday

After breakfast at 'Patch of Country' I was out on site at about 11.00 am.

I had a second go at measuring the physical jig column height and the laser derived height.

This time I achieved agreement to within 3mm.

I subtracted 10mm from the height to allow for a landing plate to hold the large back to back PFC 200 s that will sit on it.

I needed another few hours to cut the column to length, tack weld it in position, install the prop timbers and dismantle the jig.

After a break it was 3.30 pm and I wanted to leave at 6.00 pm.

I had enough time to drop the second overheight screw pile. This is the one that carries the external power socket to run the sump pump.

I carefully dropped its height to 150 mm below garage floor level and tack welded a new plate in position.

Hopefully Ross can do a complete welding job for me during the week.

Just as I was leaving, Ian Chalmers dropped in to visit me. I made it home just in time to watch Merlin :-)