Workshop

Stud walls: built
Pad surface: prepared, filled, tamped and levelled. Sarah made the world’s heaviest DIY tamper by sinking a mop handle into a plastic bucket filled with premix concrete. The end result creates a small sonic boom every time you hit the ground with it.
Concrete: pouring on Wednesday with superstar strawbale builder friend coming to help. Pro tip: if you need a good troweling job, get a strawbale builder.
Doors & Windows: waiting anxiously for the floor to be done so they can wiggle their way into the walls.
Roof: some kind of low profile gabled thing. My brains have not worked their way through this one yet.
Hydro: superstar builder/timberframer friend coming to help. For some reason using giant flammable cylinders of oxy acetylene doesn’t bother me so much as the though of messing with electrical.
Insulation: vapour barrier and foam insulation going under the pad, then the regular R22 stuff inside. Have to make sure the building isn’t super airtight otherwise that whole O/A brazing fumes thing will mean pulmonary edema.

Bike #1

I couldn’t wait for (or afford) pro paint at this stage, so I built it up and road it unpainted.

Results?

Amazing. It’s fun, beautiful, easy, freeing and comfortable. I’m first and foremost a transportational cyclist, and secondly a recreational touring cyclist, and this bike fills both those needs perfectly. It’s fast, pretty, strong, and fits just right. Certainly the mystique is added because I built it with my hands, some files, and fire. But I think the general consensus is the bike rocks.

Tools

I went hole-hog and got the Fattic design fixture. It’s damn good.

I promise more pictures next time. Blogging just ain’t my style to begin with, and then the work of finding, editing, re-sizing, and adding pictures to these posts just takes too much time!