Water Mill Blog - New Flooring
11th December 2007

Work did take place today but the main feature of the Water Mill Blog entry has to be the weather. A clear bright and very cold morning turned into a clear bright and very cold day.

In spite of the frost Martyn, Colin, John, Kim, Derek and Richard all turned up ready to do some work. Derek's speciality is keeping the landscape tidy and he soon had a bonfire going. As well as the trimmings from the laurel bushes there was a lot of rotted timber from the floor repairs to burn as well.

The local contractor clearing the farmyard also took advantage of the fire so Derek had no problem keeping it going all day.

Apart from our hot drinks flasks this was the only heat source on site and we all spent a few minutes basking in the warmth at intervals through the day..

John decided that it was too cold for bricklaying, mortar is supposed to set not freeze. He and Colin set about removing the electric motor that drove the line shaft in the hay loft. This was installed to replace the belt drive from the PTO shaft from the waterwheel, and the line shaft was shortened.

There has been no electricity supply in the building for a long time so no special precautions were necessary to dismantle the control gear and unbolt the motor from the wall.

The motor has a triple V pulley with three belts running onto a flat pulley on the line shaft. It must have worked allright but it does look odd.

We intend to re-use the line shaft to drive examples of the machines that would have been used in the past, but we want to repair the drive from the waterwheel via the PTO shaft to do that.

At the other end of the hayloft, Martyn, Kim and Richard laid new floorboards onto the joists that have been checked or replaced last week. 

They then moved across to the next bay. An examination from underneath revealed two joists that will have to be replaced and we had fitted the first of these by the end of the day.

This section of the floor is not as badly decayed as the first section we tackled but there are some bad spots. We are trying to lift the old boards without breaking them so that we can re-use the best bits in the mill. The top floor of the mill is in a very poor condition and repairs will be necessary.

That's about it for this Water Mill Blog entry. We had all packed up and left to get warm by four o'clock.

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