I spent the first few hours of Saturday cutting up additional cleats for the diagonal beam.

I was avoiding making a start when Ian rang up - so we had a coffee instead.

By about midday I was out on site

I spent about an hour carefully moving a 5metre length of PFC 200 around to use a solid base to avoid distortion.

Next I cut through the unsuccessful weld using a very fine 5 inch angle grinding disk and reformed the bevels.

I carefully clamped the two pieces of PFC 150 to the base and slowly worked through all the welds while avoiding applying too much heat in any one place.

In the end I managed to create a perfectly straight joined piece.

By now it was 4.2 metres long and rather heavy.

I used a trolley I brought from home to move this piece up the driveway across the front verge and down to the diagonal mounting position.

One end needs to be slotted so that it mounts 50 mm lower so instead I temporarily propped the other end with a 50 mm piece of timber.

I was convinced that it was not level and that all my calculations were wrong.