Saturday 11 April 2015

11th April 2015

Wow, cannot its been so long since my last update, however the weather has stopped play and I have also been busy with other things at the Hooton Park Trust.

Now that the weather has improved I decided to start work on the new canopy, this time I have decided to use scaffolding, which will either be welded or bolted to the frame that she sits on so no matter how bad the winds are we will not have a repeat of January.

I bought about 500' of new poles, which arrived on Friday after drawing various options on paper.  What was interesting is that despite having a plan on paper when push came to shove I ended up adapting and changing as things didn't quite work out.

In fact after 2 days I have probably assembled it and disassembled it about 4 times.  You can see from the pictures that the standards (uprights are at an angle), these will be braced by some vertical standards once the whole structure is complete:




Next week I'll be ordering more scaffolding to I can do the middle and back sections, then once the pitched roof shape is in place I'll then wrap it in heat shrink polythene.

One thing that I am mindful of is that to the right of the boat is a 150 year old tree, that if it comes down in a storm will make a bit of a mess of 2552 so I'll probably go over kill in that side of her just in case.

Saturday 10 January 2015

10th January 2015


24 hours of sustained winds, of anything up to 80 mile an hour finally took its toll last night.

Disaster struck last night, when the storms lifted the canopy off the boat and dropped it onto the ground next to the boat, after snapping most of the upright timbers.


It was sickening to see to be honest, all the hard work that went into building it, reduced to not much more than fire wood.



Not one piece of it is salvageable and due to the bad weather this time of year there is little I can do about it until the weather changes.

The only saving grace is that 2552 wasn't damaged.