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September 29, 2002
sixty-two percent
How much of it is finished, I keep asking myself this question. Well, for the most part it is ready to be complete, but I have a snag. The support system for my 4' cantilevers is not available in Gainesville, and special ordering such a part may be a while...I am not sure what to do, so I trudge on, plans unchanged. Friday and yesterday I borrowed vehicles from friends for a few hours at a time to transport all of my materials to the trail-head of my site, and today, with the help of an extremely generous friend(Jonathan) I lugged all of the wood back to it's new resting place. My shoulders hurt. After failing to be able to dig through cypress roots, we successfully installed the major portion of the structure in it's new location. It is right next to the stream running through the swamp and now it actually extends out over the water. You can't sit on it yet, but it will be nice, when you can.
Aside from the last picture, which is my design prof. preparing for is confrontation with batman, these are all from my site today while we were working on my structure, I forgot to take the last picture when the planks had all been installed, and it really started to look like a viewing platform, but I will be posting more pics of the finished product soon. Getting the 14' 4"x4" posts into the ground was a bit of a challenge, I needed two four-foot holes to drop this thing into and once we got to about three feet, the holes -- filled with water from the stream, not 3 feet away -- kept collapsing as we tried to dig any further. We decided to try to ram the posts in for the last foot, since the soil seemed maleable enough to manipulate something through. A mad dash to Lowe't to buy a hatchet so I could turn the ends of the posts into spikes for killing the largest vampire you could ever imagine. We dropped it into place, and that didn't work entirely, on it's own, so Jonathan climed up to the first teir and jumped on it until it was in about another 6 inches and by most standards, pretty stable.
Posted by tbartels at September 29, 2002 11:59 PM