My hopes of finishing the cleat welding during the week went unfulfilled.

In order to avoid distorting the beam I really wanted to pace the welding out across the day to give each weld a chance to cool down before starting the next one.

I could have clamped the diagonal beam on to some base steel but this would have been very difficult now that it had cleats projecting from the underside.

I calculated and marked up the weld positions and tack welded in the 7 cleats, then made the first weld.

To keep busy on other jobs while waiting for welds to cool I primed the extension piece that I had completed last week.

I didn't want this in the way of my welding work and the good carpentry horses were in use so I needed to use a set of rather old, abused, folding pine horses.

I had been making do with these at home, with the hinges detaching from the timber but for a load of 60Kg I decided I needed to do some refurbishment.

I spent about half an hour pushing in new screws wherever there was any looseness, loaded on the piece of steel and then painted it with primer.

Welding the cleats on to the diagonal spread out over most of the day (2 welds per cleat) and so I spent a lot of the day manipulating the 13m beam that will eventually form the outer perimeter of the back veranda.

I used levers, ropes and the utility to position this parallel to the line of columns.

Then I built 4 columns out of the calsil bricks and rolled the beam up some timbers on to these columns.

I then went around each column, used the winch up trolley and inserted more courses of bricks to bring the beam up to a comfortable working height.

There is a lot of work to be done on this beam - brushing off rust, rust converting, welding on cleats, priming - so I don't want to be squatting on the ground while I am doing all this.

Also, with the beam raised about 900 mm off the ground I will be able to slide in the hoist that I used on the top side beams about a month ago.

I finally finished the welding on the diagonal beam and then applied the primer.