12 August 2012
By Keven Loo
As Frankie was too
busy to be able to help us with the construction of the extension system, we
instead turned to my father to help us construct. Unfortunately, he was not as
skilled or experienced, hence the workmanship was not as good as if it was done
by an expert or a factory. Still, it was more than sufficient to bear the
weight of the plant trays (when filled with water).
In the original
blueprint, the extension required considerably many materials: 14 wood planks,
screws and full-length metal brackets. As a result, this made the construction
process tedious and extremely time-consuming. For example, accurate
measurements must be made on the areas where the wood planks need to be
connected to allow the screw to fasten them together. The fact that I, or none
of my other group members, lacked technical skills required for such tasks
meant that our help in construction was extremely limited to simpler tasks such
as carrying and holding the planks together or rarely, helping to screw the
nails into the wood.
We started off
building with the smallest stair, and we used the least number of wood screws
since the platform was not far off the ground.
The number of wood screws used increased as the height increased, to
stabilise the entire structure. We had decided to leave the installation of the
metal brackets to the end, since we had a insufficient number of them. In the
end, after 3 hours of visiting DIY shops and metalwork shops around our area,
we were unable to find any shop selling metal brackets. Thankfully for us, all
three of the stairs were able to stand and support weights of up to 5kg each
(during our testing), and thus we left out the metal brackets.
However, one problem
we had encountered during the construction was the fact that some of the wood
would start to splinter or disintegrate into dust as holes were being drilled.
Therefore, this posed a danger to us when we tried to shift the wood around as
we risked being cut by the splinters. Furthermore, the wood dust was very light
and was easily spread around by the wind.
Fortunately, most of
the processes went relatively well and we managed to construct the extension set.
The new extension looks like this:
Even though Frankie
was unable to help us, we are grateful to Frankie for helping us in our time of
need once again (sending wood supplies and ordering them to cut it for us,
which was a hassle if we were to do it by ourselves) , even though he was
extremely busy. I would also like to give credit to my father as he willingly
helped us to construct the extension without hesitation. Hence, we strive to
make this project an even bigger success to ensure that the efforts of those
who have supported us will not be wasted.
No comments:
Post a Comment