Took some time gathering more stuff needed to finish this off;
(Concrete not needed, but there's boxes of strutural resin, stainless studs and fixing resin + tooling in that lot).
The resin wouldn't be needed if the floor was level, but because there's a slight slope on the floor of the barn, the front columns need to be elevated.
Phil and Donald very, very kindly gave up their valentines weekend to come down and help me getting it installed
At least, I think it was Donald? He might just have duped us all and sent a local 'yoof' scally in his place, from all we could tell...
Because it was going to be cold, I'd bought winter grade stud fixing resin (works down to -5) but the structural resin needs +5 to cure in a reasonable time frame, so Donald and I went to pick up some heaters from HSS before starting on Day 1. Who knew it could take FORTY MINUTES to hire such simple equipment?
(The guy wasn't the worlds brainiest and was having a bad day I think...) Anyway, not helpful
Once at the barn, first job was to get all the cars out (one of the CX's was sat on the bed of the ramp and one was on the trailer). My planned patented cheap sump fix (gaffer tape
) couldn't be done because of bum droppings access, so that was abandoned then the other CX was a PITA to start (electrics on that one are NOT well...) After that we had to get the (fully assembled) bed of the ramp off the floor onto the trailer, so we could move it around and level it etc.
This was a monster effort and ball-ache (worse than expected) so no pics taken.
After it was loaded onto the trailer, we got the bed in position and started offering the legs up around it to check position.
Needed to avoid clashes between the column stud positions and rebar in the floor. This was also a major, major ball ache and took us a while (as expected)
Donald offered expert advice and guidance;
Then Phil offered his pearls of wisdom about stud length...
Who knew Donald could deliver such pleasure with an industrial vacuum cleaner?
On a serious note though, was massively impressed with the £50 Silverline SDS drill
Went through the C40 concrete with no problems End of day one - about 2 hours behind where we wanted to be... All columns loosely located and studs installed;
Anyway, happy with that, so onto the next thing - put the locking beam on the front columns to check the distance between them is consistent...
More angst and head scratching... 
Columns can't be too far apart because they appear to fit the bed fine? 
