About the only productive thing I achieved was to prune away all the branches shooting off the stump of the tree we felled six months ago - they were starting to intrude on the veranda string lines.

To fix the distortion in the beam (see previous week) I hauled out a number of pieces of heavy steel to clamp the work on to while I did the last of the welding.

At one stage I thought I had succeeded and left the work clamped up while it cooled.

Unfortunately, when I came back to it the distortion was just as bad as before - a 10 mm deviation over 4 metres.

On Sunday I nipped out to site again to see if I had a long enough piece in my stockpile - but not quite.