Putting a wonderful day to good use
We
are learning that there are a few special tools required for our build.
Tools that we can make ourselves. We made our own tampers and bag
holders awhile back and that was fun. The newest handmade tool, although no proper name can be given, is to hold down the barbed wire between the
rows of bags while working on the walls. It is basically a brick with a
string attached and a clip to keep the string in place.
We
had a few bricks from the house which we took when we moved knowing
these tools were to be made. We purchased 2000 feet of nylon twine and
had wire clothes hangers that could be used to make the clips. With all
this in hand we set out to make 30+ of these.
First
the hangers had to be cut. If you have ever tried to cut a hanger it's
not all that difficult but in this case each hanger had to be cut in
three places. Starting out doing so with a hand held set of, not too
sharp, wire cutters, 90 odd times, was not something to look forward to
but we could fix that. You see we were doing this at our very good
friend's house and he has a couple of massive garages that contain just about anything you are looking for and can makeshift anything. So we took a rather large set of bolt cutters put
them in the vise and in less than 5 minutes had the wires cut. The
twisting and bending of the wire into clips took quite a bit more time
but the vise again was utilized. We had already cut the 2000 feet of
twine into lengths that were double the width of his deck, our
approximation of 50 feet, and were ready to start putting the pieces
together.
We
sat at the front of one of the garages in the full sunshine of a lovely
Easter Sunday evening affixing the clips to the twine, using the knot used to
tie fishing line to a hook, the twine was then wrapped around the brick
and clipped so it all stays together until ready for use for the
building of our walls. We had quite a production line going and actually
the time passed quickly as the sun set.
It was both an extremely pleasant and productive day.
