Various Brickwork Jobs
12th April 2007

We had a day with different kinds of brickwork this Thursday at Shelsley Watermill. Dave did some more or less conventional bricklaying on the PTO shaft channel while Max laid brick flooring. Richard spent most of the day cleaning up second hand coping bricks as well, which makes three kinds of brickwork, well, working with bricks anyway.

Max worked alongside the waterwheel to complete a section of paving that he started last week and then moved inside the mill. The brick floor at the foot of the ladder up to the working floor had broken up and become very uneven. Max has lifted all the broken bricks and any uneven ones and made a good start at re-laying them soundly.

The PTO shaft crosses from the mill to the mill barn and ends below the steps to the stable loft. Dave had to work in the pit that houses the pulley to complete the brickwork that lines the channel. This has to make him our 'awkward access' bricklayer because the last job he did was on the side of the mill working around the waterwheel spokes.

Colin and Headley continued fitting new parts to the waterwheel. The bolt holes in the wheel rims are cast in place and the spacing varies a bit. Because of this each back plate is a bit of a fiddle to bolt in place. It's not only the back plates that are fiddly. Some of the sockets for the buckets coincide with joints in the segments that make up the rim of the wheel and these sockets need slightly shorter buckets. There are also bolts fixing the joints and the bolt heads get in the way of fitting the buckets. The picture shows a notch being cut in the edge of a bucket to clear on of these heads.

Derek and Martyn worked on tidying up the area between the mill and the church with a bit of help from Richard and the JCB in the afternoon. We think we have got most of the roots out now and we might be able to do some planting soon.

The Court House team have made more progress with the dam brickwork and are now discussing how long it will take for the pool to fill once they put the plug back in. The current weather forecast doesn’t hold out much hope of rain but the stream is still running so we will just have to wait and see.

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