Watermill Blog -  New Volunteer
29th July 2008

A new name gets added to our watermill blog today as Finton gets to know the rest of the team.

We had donation of a length of lineshafting complete with pulleys, bearings and supports so the new recruit was given the job of cleaning and dismantling it all.

He has agreed to come back again so we haven't scared him off.

John and Jonathan carried on with the brickwork to the stepped path up to the roadway, alternately taking shelter from the showers and baking in the sunshine. They will soon have finished all the bricklaying jobs, at least until we get Listed Building Consent for a retaining wall on the north side of the mill, so they might have to learn new skills.

Martyn and Bob continued with the painting today and there are now only two windows to be finished, the ones facing the stable barn. Even those have had a coat of undercoat.

Colin did some much needed cleaning up around the upstream pair of millstones. He wanted to see how much needs to be done to repair the base for the tun that Richard is working on. Most of the base is sound but two segments have succumbed to rot and will need to be replaced.

Richard has finished cutting all the pieces for the sides of the new tun and is ready to start the assembly.

The construction is simple, angled butt joints held together with wide fillets all fixed with cut nails. The trick will be to keep the assembly true and flat, hence the trial assembly on a nice flat floor.

The whole thing is a copy of the original, now too fragile to take the weight of the grain hopper and its frame.

As ever, a certain amount of time was spent discussing aspects of the machinery. Today's subject was the speed that the stable barn lineshaft would run at. The overall gearing from the waterwheel is about 11:1 which would see the lineshaft spinning at somewhere between 100 and 130 r.p.m. quite fast enough for the machinery we have.

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