I was out of bed at 6.00 am and on site by 8.00 am.

However, I started to feel as if I was fighting off the flu so I left around 2.00 pm, headed home, took large doses of vitamin C and rugged up.

I'll see if I can fight it off - if I had kept soldiering on out at site I'm pretty sure I would have succumbed.

The second brace around the other side of the tank went in pretty easily.

Again - I had four pieces of rod already bent and threaded at one end.

All I needed to do was measure, cut and thread the rods at the other end.

It's still rather hard work for my hands doing the thread cutting but I ended up with a neat job.

After a bit of tweaking I had the tank overflow pipe neatly moved 80mm from the tank.

I helped Ross for about an hour - he had just bought a notebook computer and needed a bit of help configuring it and setting up an account with an ISP.

Good to be able to help in return for once.

Next I turned my attention to the front bracing.

I had intended to drill 12 mm holes at the top and bottom of each 75mm column.

I was going to bend and thread one end of each rod to pass through the columns but as I suspected - the adjustable thread was in the way inside, near the top of the column.

I discovered this as soon as I drilled a pilot hole near the top of the column.

I realised that I would need to use the alternative attachment method - ie weld a tab on to one end of each rod and then weld the tab on to the face of each column.

I will work on setting up 16 rods during the week - so at least I will make some progress despite stopping early today.