Blow the bloody doors off !

Workshop project part two.

This work period starts with me ‘ripping the doors off’ and finishes with me having a very long mucking out session as I ended the first part of the job with creating a large muck pile of clay and stones as I dug my first trench. As I write, the first of what may well end up being several, skips has arrived and I have to admit how surprised at the expense : also if I go beyond two five yard skips I have to send soil samples for analysis despite the fact that the soil hasn’t been touched in fifty or more years.

Also, at the start of this work period I put together a ready tool kit based on a Stanley tradesman’s bag similar to the one in which I carried all of my boat tools while on passage – with at least two of my boats I seemed to be continuously rebuilding and modifying them while at anchor. At the same time I rearranged all of the useful junk that came out of the workshop such that I could have a short section of temporary work surface on my long boatbuilding bench.

My main effort in this quarter (i’m scheduling the posts in quarterly pattern) has been in smashing the remains of the floor out and at the same time digging out the granite blocks that the concrete has been (thinly in most cases) laid on top. The real oddity during this quarter has been in giving the old roof a support post sat on some thick plywood pads so that I can continue digging out around the compression post holding up the one deep beam that the various roof supports are attached to : when he was here my partner’s brother in law noticed that most of the roof supports are actually bolted to the one cross beam by way of old bits of cast iron bedstead (mines are often very wet in this area) or the win hoist(winding engine) to bring out the ore.

The current structure mainly comprises of concrete blocks over a mixed floor (don’t know what, if any, the foundations are like) built in the late 1960’s by my next door neighbor’s late grandfather mainly for the purpose of working on cars – the purpose of the central deep roof beam was to sling a tayckle or chain hoist used to lift engines out of the cars he was working on. When we took the place over, some ten plus years ago, the internal layout was a bit weird in that the main workbench was against the low side of the building and I cant stand fully upright on that side but then my neighbor is vertically challenged so if his grandfather was anything like his build then he would have been fine with the headroom.

This place is strongly associated with mining, as iv’e mentioned in other posts there is the remnant of a mineshaft in the green area just downhill of our property : there was once a house there until most of it’s garden disappeared into a huge hole in the ground, apparently caused by rising and falling ground water. The shaft was repaired and capped and all that exists now is a locked manhole cover which is opened periodically for workers to access the shaft and adit below – when we came here one thing we had to do before making an offer on the place is an extensive mines search – as it is the adit only crosses the very bottom corner of our garden. One of the first things to occur when I came and camped out here was to be sat up in my sleeping bag one morning to see two blokes calmly walking down our driveway to lower a transducer cable down a metal tube left there for the purpose : nowadays the selfsame pipe is directly under where I have my Pathfinder dinghy parked.

Mining digression aside……the really hard work for me during this quarter has been that of manually digging out the 24 square metres of hard clay and granite floor : I calculated that I have 24 square metres to dig out to about .3 of a metre so I work that out as 7.2 cubic metres of mixed clay and rock to hack out and it’s so dense that I can’t even get a spade to bite so i’m mainly using a mini mattock (sort of ice axe size) so this is going to be a long old slog.

This month iv’e been having fantasies about new tools and new custom workbenches but iv’e spent most of my leisure time – when i’m not totally physically exhausted in the arcane micro corner of the internet devoted to home made dust collection systems. What I really should be doing is finding a better (at least easier) method for digging the dense clay and rock ground layer out – I suspect that what most would say is to use a mini digger but then if I hired one I would feel under pressure to do the entire job inside a day so perhaps it’s better for me to spend just a couple of hours a day hacking away at it with (now) a big boy builders mattock and spade.

Today’s mineral then because one small piece of rock I dug out definitely had signs of copper.

For bonus points anyone – can anyone name this one and tell us what’s to be found in it. ? The connection is that I have a look at most stones as they come out and so far I may have found a Tin nodule and some very small signs of Copper – hardly surprising given that this site was once a Copper and Tin mine.