Sole Plate

I had Monday off and at 8am I was ready to roll, my neighbour Sean kindly said he would lend me his SDS drill and power.
We setup the power, he also gave me a laser level which going to save us some time.
We got the SDS drill only to discover that the 8mm bit I had was miles to small to use for the large SDS drill so I tripped off into town and rented one (20 euro).

I had got 90mm Express nails and when we started off these were fine but the lowest point one the raft was 1/4 an inch lower than the highest so it was taking 3 slates to level it and we decided to get a box of 120mm express nails and these did the trick.
What you have to install a sole plate is so that the when the timber frame arrives you can leave it on the sole plate and nail into it. The sole plate has to be level within +/- 5mm.
The way you get level is you find the highest point on the raft or soap bar in our case and you take your levels off this. With the "pro" level we had it beeped when we were level.
To get the sole plate level you have to put slate underneath, it cannot be timber as it compresses.
you then drill your soleplate at 600mm centres and express nail into the soleplater and soap bar, believe me you will not move this!!

With the help of my da and our mate John slowly but surely we made progress. We had to head off to a building site to get more scrap slate.
Also we had to get more scaffolding and some 1 & 2 board extenders for the scaffolding.

We finally finished the sole plates about 9pm in terrible conditions with was now about 2 inches of water in the raft and drown like rats but it had to be done.,

The final task was to secure the scaffolding with some 22fts on the gables and tie it all together with 8fts and clets. I also had to put up some more 9fts on the outside of the back and front and handrails on the same.
These were also done and then we had to erect the safety sign. We were absolutely buckled after a long weekend and a 14 hour day but everything was ready to rock.
A nice shower and good feed we well welcomed.

Another early morning awaited me but it was going to be well worth it.