Indoor work

John did what John does best, lay bricks. Tricky stuff this time, repairing the side of a window opening and then making a start on the first of the brick piers.

The other John got to do indoor work in the stable section of the long barn, removing the steel rails that projected from the floor and generally getting the space into some kind of order. This end of the barn has two floors and will give us 140 square metres of floor space when we have decided what to do with it.

Back to the indoor work in the mill, the drain pipes that we found under the floor proved to be impossible to clean out in situ, so we lifted them out and gave them a good clean in the stream. With those out of the way we laid three concrete pads for the three piers. Each pad has a drain through it and we will replace the cleaned up drain pipes so that any damp that gets in has a way of getting out again.

This seems to be what the original builders intended. They couldn’t stop the water getting in through the walls so they just arranged things so that it could get out again.

The Court House team have now uncovered the full extent of the mill-pool dam and the original spillway. Time and neglect has seen the water find a different route around the end of the dam, even though it ends up in the same place, and this is going to take some serious work to restore the pool to full capacity. It will make a wonderful feature for the Court House when it is restored, as well as providing the water supply for the mill.

A couple of outdoor jobs did get done today as well. Derek used a core drill to make a drain from the PTO shaft chamber into the culvert. We forgot to put one in when we repaired the roof of the culvert so the chamber was getting more than a little damp. Headley finished off bolting the penstock valve runners to the brickwork in the pool and did some more work on the sluice box and the stack pipe.

Martyn and Richard acted as general labourers, providing encouragement and mortar or encouragement and concrete, whatever was needed.

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