Carrerahill

Well first thing is what software do you have access to? I am sitting with ACAD 2017 in front of me at the moment and have 2015 on other machines. What you propose to do requires very basic CAD skills to be honest, I reckon you could do it with the commands L for line tool, CO for copying stuff, select and Delete key to delete stuff select and M to move stuff and if you don't worry about colours and layers and just draw everything in lines and print it in black and white no one will know you've not got everything all properly layered etc. But this means having ACAD - the licence I have on this machine is £1500 I did have a ummm. "trail" version I used at one point too, it was a long trail. However, you can download and install ACAD on trail for 30 days. If I was you I would just get hold of it and start messing about tonight, loads of guides and it's pretty easy once you get to grips with the, well grips and commands! Just how much work is involved? Mean are we moving a few lines or are there curbs and soft verges and general civils to add and all sorts? I would offer to do it for you but if you read my other posts this is a big weekend for me, excavator rolls in tomorrow! I could maybe find you a CAD tech would would do it for a small fee.

When I help on my friends farm we often build bonfires to get rid of large quantities of hawthorn which is a pig to handle in fact considered a hazardous waste (bacterial infections, allergic reactions and can be fatal). We need to phone the local fire control, they can also advise you don't burn if it is considered too high a risk that due to hot weather the fire could spread etc. and give them details of the site of the fire and rough timings, this helps to reduce people reporting it and the FB responding - such as the summers night we had 3 appliances stuck down a farm road - the FB actually commended us on our burn pile and the safety measures we had employed including firefighting equipment on site in case it got out of control, mind you, the fire was 20 feet high and about 1000sq feet in area! Re. planning department, I would assume it is just notifying them of planning destruction of materials by fire - I would also cite the issues regarding the nails making it difficult to cut up safely and that it would not recycle well owing to the fact the chippers would hate all the nails. Also don't burn anything that is going to generate acrid smoke like plastics and things.

Me too!

Honda are always good - I know the owner of a plant hire place and he only buys equipment that can withstand hire use - basically mainly a bunch of monkeys with no care in the world for the poor machines. Which is why I look at what he and take his advice on which tools are hire-proof therefore will last me a long long time! He uses Honda and John Deere or kit with Briggs and Stratton engines - I also know the national trust almost always buy Honda mowers. The thing to bear in mind is that the engine and self drive gearbox is the critical bit really - If the deck seems well made and a good engine sits atop then the chances are it is a decent mower. All the good ones last well if maintained and used with care. I would probably not opt to straighten the shaft, is the shaft in fact the crankshaft that drops down via the drive gear for the self drive? or is it a second shaft after a "gearbox"? If it is the main crankshaft then it will probably be cast iron on a small engine like that, it has probably already fractured and could let go, trying to straighten it will almost certainly guarantee it will fail possibly with fatal consequences. If it is a shaft from an intermediary gearbox then it could be machined steel in which case there is a chance it could be fixed but unless you can get it onto a lathe it is almost certainly going to destroy a bearing and tear itself apart as you will never get it straight enough. Post some images. I notice you can get Ryobi mowers with Subaru engines!!!

Update: planning officer has just left after doing her site visit, she says I can call on Friday and get a verbal with the letter going out soon after. The garage has had half the roof removed so half of it can be demolished this weekend - I will slice the walls down with the angle grinder and a diamond blade where the temporary stud/OSB wall is and pull it over with the excavator which shall be delivered on Saturday morning. I have ordered some hardcore for the garage slab area, top soil, fence posts and rails to build some "edging" which I will then fill up to the top of with good excavated soil to make the new level of the lawn - don't worry it will only be 200mm high. I was just going to form a little slope off at the end of the garden but I decided I would just edge it and finish it off square, I will then fill the other side with some bark around the trunks of the tree's there and that should look smart. By Sunday night I would like to have completed the following stages: 1. Edge lawn on 3 sides with posts and rails to raise it to current patio height. 2. Dig a hole in the middle of the lawn about 3m x 3m down to about clay layer. 3. Pull half of the side wall of garage down and the two small sections of wall either side of the car door. 4. Scrape garage site of poor gravelly top soil. 5. Chuck the wall and poor gravel contaminated top soil into the hole in the lawn (should I lay some pipe down to this area to create a soakaway of sorts?) 6. Fill in the hole compacting as we go. 7. Scrape the whole lawn site of all grass and turn it over and roughly level it. 8. Scrape the garage site of all the good top soil (and it is good stuff) using all or some of it to back fill the lawn site up to the edge of the new edging. 9. I may go right down to clay on the garage site if it's not just going to be an excessive depth and vast amounts of hardcore but on this site I think clay is only 300mm down. 10. Level the lawn site. At this point I will go and get a cold beer and with any luck light the BBQ for my *cough* workers *cough* - ahem family/friends. Probably a lot to try and do in a day but I think we can do it. Sunday morning assuming I have done all the above in a day I will scrape the front drive nearest the house of all the pebbles and a thin layer of poor soil in prep for a new front lawn. To get rid of this gravel I will maybe chuck it on the garage site. Spread the hardcore over the garage site. At that I think I am done. Additional work I may do if time and spare soil permits is remove a row of slabs adjacent to the new lawn to make it a little longer, if I have even more time and there is plenty of soil I may even move 3/4 columns of slabs and churn that up a bit, dig a trench for a small retaining wall to make a small raised bed along the side of the garden and then a strip of lawn. Wish me luck - will I post photos?

Thanks for your reply Mike. The girl from planning has just left after doing her site visit and said that I can send her an email with the skylights shown on the roof in a drawing and she will OK them as she saw no reason they would cause an issue - overlooking issues etc. Anyway, good news is she says I can call on Friday and should have my answer with the official letter (paper? digital?) following soon after, she says what I am doing is pretty clear-cut and I can expect to be granted permission. Pretty pleased with this as the neighbour consultation only ended on Monday! Good news, as the excavator rolls in on Saturday morning!

Did you reply to the right post? My post was confirming water board will not want anyone "pumping" from the network after Craig confirmed it was Scottish Water who had the concerns and the builder then removed the pumps.

Not always, you would be surprised at the complete lack of logic applied between planning, BC, and utility boards. Some of the examples of total incompetence I witness with regard to this sort of thing would have you in tears.

Ah got you, I thought they were just removed for some reason - the water board won't want the pump creating a vacuum on their system for many reasons, for example damage can occur to seals which need pressure to seal and another is negative pressure in the network can lead to ingress of contaminants.

I have inside information on this one, not that it will be very surprising to many of you I am sure but the issue is caused primarily by new estates getting planning permission without proper consultation with the water board, so up goes another 500 homes in an area they never thought would be developed and there you have it a water main (and sewer for that matter) designed to cope with X number of homes now has to cope with X + 500. What do you expect, simple fluid dynamics. They wanted to build a new distillery in Edinburgh a couple of years ago, everything was about to get approved when someone said to the client what were they going to do about water, well, they needed a supply from the local Scottish Water network... So they went away and spoke to Scottish Water about a 3 inch main for the distillery, not a chance was Scottish Waters reply, turned out the network in the area was now running at 150% of designed capacity as it was and the network could not be renewed for about another 10 years. Result - entire project was scrapped - yet the full design was there, everything was done, but no one thought to simply ask - where will the water come from.

Why was the pump removed after a year?

Well today was a bit of a milestone for my extension project as the structural engineer has approved the existing foundations and walls which is great, I guess in a way that's us now out of the ground albeit the next stages are demolition. So here is the story, you may know from my other post there is a garage being built, well it will once planning comes through, planning is joint with this extension - planning didn't assign our application to an officer and well that was 10 weeks ago! It will be with me in 4 to 5 weeks I am told! Oh good! So the build is an existing sunroom being converted into a proper room which will become the kitchen - our back garden is about 1500 below floor level so the sunroom was obviously built up to match FFL in the existing house, so there are decent founds and a good going block cavity wall, so my plan was to reuse all of this. My architect put in my building control application at the same time as the planning and it seems to be going slightly more smoothly. The BCO came back and asked for a certification for the founds, the SE visited tonight and has confirmed he will be happy to write to BC and confirm they are suitable for my proposed build and gave me some good tips and advice on how to do some bits and pieces - one of them was based on a suspicion that the existing floor joists are held up by joist hangers fixed to the inner block wall - this leaf will be demolished to top of joist level anyway as the timber frame will sit partially on the block and the rest on the timber frame, if hangers have been used he advised for the sake of 15 or so joists I should demolish the inner block wall down an additional block and run new joists over the top of the wall so it sits on it rather than hangs from it so that the loading is not such that it is trying to tip the block inwards. Made sense to me and is something I can easily do myself and I don't mind having to remove the joists because they will work perfectly as studs if they are OK or if a bit rough in the garage build. So I am expecting BC approval very soon and hopefully the build can commence mid to late August once planning consent is granted. So I am starting to think about the build and how I will do it, my plan is to get the existing Sun Room removed and get the walls demoed to the various heights etc. myself, and make good any bits and pieces, I will also then be able to either confirm the joists are fine or run in new ones. Then I was going to build the timber frame myself, I am very confident about the actual building, but my issue is experience of BC approved practises and accepted methods, once I am happy with these through talking to you guys, my architect and my structural engineer it won't be an issue, I just need to check and double check all my dims and make sure it's all spot on, so herein the first question, the frame will sit against the original house in two places, do I run a piece of DPM between the house and the first stud then fasten the stud to the house with the same fixings as speced for the roof beam? I cannot actually see a detail for this anywhere, I assume it gets tied into the existing wall? Once I build the frame I assume I can then just fix my wall plate and lay in my joists - now here is the second question, I asked for 2 skylights in the roof, I looked at the drawings at the time on a mobile as I was on business and said yeah looks fine, mistake! My architect didn't include the skylights, so how can I get these in now that the BCO is about to approve the drawings... Can I email him after approval and discuss - I would say I will sister the beams either side and affix the tie beam in with all the correct metalwork. Do you think he will accept it at that and let me go for it? What is the script with variations with BC. Thanks

Well, I have an update from planning. They didn't allocate my application so it's been sat unassigned to a planning officer! The council say they have a statutory 2 months to give you planning, well that's us into the 10th week, so I could not technically appeal but I don't want to start upsetting them because I am sure you all know what they can be like. They will now fast track it but need a minimum of 21 days for neighbour objections, I don't see a letter on the lamppost yet so I hope they back-date it! I am annoyed at myself though because I knew a letter would be attached to the lamppost outside, I was even waiting for it about a month ago, but sort of forgot about it recently with all the other things happening at the moment. I am just going to let it all happen then tear a shred off them once I have my consent and also try and at least get my money back.

Been back to the engineer and discussed the wall, he is happy with what has been built and confirmed it was all as planned, the back wall is not going to be doing a hell of a lot apparently. I think I just had an overactive imagination of the slab slipping slightly, but it won't due to the ground prep planned etc. So I am happy, I did however build engineering brick buttresses and finished the wall. Looks good. I am happy with it. It looks a bit German Bunker now actually. I mentioned the no fines concrete back-fill and he said if I wanted to, it would do no harm and would mean we didn't need to ensure he back-fill was whacked.

Hi - we just posted at the same time. Noted the shear key comments but see my reply above - this is OK. I am interested in your calcs spreadsheet. That could be a goer to get me some figures. Thanks!

Hi Dave, thanks for your input. The sketch is inaccurate, it's being dug down into undisturbed boulder-clay. But had it in real life been as drawn, I'd agree! Yes, the site is being excavated down to the hard clay, the soil being used to lift the lawn. I like your idea of the stepped site, then level each site onto level ground - the sketch was not ideal, it didn't show it all properly it was just to show the wall issue. Yes the third sketch is the wall with a engineering block buttress then filled with concrete. I am just in this minute from the builders yard with engineering brick so that's the weekend sorted!

Hi guys, I have a question regarding my garage slab, I'd just like to see what you guys think and also what you may have experience with. I have attached some sketches to help explain this. My garage site is on a slope, it slopes to the back. I dug out and poured at the rear elevation a C35/40 foundation 400-450mm wide and min 200mm deep. I then built a 2 block high wall, I may add a single row of engineering brick along the top to get the level spot on, so this is going to become the rear wall. It was done like this because of the slope, the amount of shuttering and the strength of said shuttering would have been fairly heavy duty and because of the proximity to the neighbours it would mean needing to remove mature hedges to build the shuttering structure - their only stipulation when I said I wanted to build this garage was to leave the hedges, although they are my hedges I have respectfully done this. The rear found and wall also forms a back shear key of sorts to help support the slab and stop it slipping (there will be another mid-point shear key cast as part of the slab). It's all quite well thought out and a civil engineer gave me the design spec but I have got some questions now. I was thinking about the slab and how it will work in relation to this little wall, the next stage would be to attach 6x2/8x2 to the wall running up to the front to form the shuttering. The concrete will then fill the shuttering up to the rear wall, but my concern is that the slab could push upon this wall and potentially push it out in the future if there was any slippage or settlement. So I have decided that I think the slab should sit on top of the small block wall, this would then mean that the rear wall would restart on the slab, and if slippage settlement occurs it would be less likely just to push out the rear wall - instead the wall would move with it. So I would build the shuttering to the back of the wall and let the concrete sit on top of the wall. I would need to insure that the infill was very well whacked to ensure the slab didn't settle on the inside of the wall and crack as it cannot move because of the wall. I was tempted to make up a no-fines concrete and back fill on the inside of the wall so that it was a bigger concrete base. I have sketched out some thoughts and options. I am an engineer so I tend to look at things in every fine detail, but not being a structural/civil engineer I can only start letting my mind run away with ideas and thoughts that I don't have training in.

I usually buy my batteries from RS Components then solder up replacements, make sure to match the chemistry, for a charger you can look at various options including another manufacturers 12V battery charger (more like 13-14V output) but again try and match the type of chargers because it will almost certainly be NiMH or NiCAD and the different types charge differently. NiCAD charger's will usually undercharge NiMH for example.

This is great info and the 345 rule was going to be my go to for the garage slab shuttering but I have another question which I will tag onto this to keep it to one informative wall starting post; I know the OP has a spinny laser thingy to get his heights, but what did they do before this magic? The reason I ask is I built a small wall a few weeks ago, I was fairly sure of the found being fairly level as I did my best to get it right. So I worked out the proposed location of the wall with pegs and strings and stuff and checked and checked again to make sure I was about to start my wall in the correct location then I placed a bed of mortar on my found, set the first block and then wrapped a string around it and ran it out to the opposite end of the wall (5000mm away), I then took another block and just placed it at the centre point on the found and sat a straight piece of CLS between the first block and the middle block and using packers set it till the CLS was dead level and sat square on both blocks, I then used that block to run the CLS to the opposite corner of my 5000mm long wall. I lined up the opposite corner block, set a bed of mortar and lightly sat the block on it, then using my CLS and level I was able to check that the block was dead level to the middle block. I checked all the levels again and was happy, I set the line to the very top edge of the two blocks now set in mortar and I now had my line to work to... or so I thought. I started running block into the centre from both ends at the same time and when I got to the middle block the LHS wall was 10mm taller than the RHS. Now over 5000mm this is a heck of a lot in my eyes. To resolve it I just ran a slightly bigger bed on the low side and a smaller bed on the high side. I know it would not pass BC and is not good but as it is just 2 blocks high to hold some back-fill up and will end up covered in concrete I was not too upset; well actually I was because I spent a lot of time trying to get it right. But what would have been the way to do this and get it right? I guess my CLS was not that straight, never is I guess - should have used a piece of aluminium box section or gone in smaller increments and used a 1800mm level.

I now have a small wall along the back found which the slab will be poured up to. I still have no planning permission for any of my projects annoyingly, that is 8 weeks almost to the day so I am hoping for something soon as I want to get watertight structures up before mid autumn! I will post some update photos soon.

Well, nothing has happened this weekend, it rained too much, I was at the building show in Glasgow on Sunday though so picked up some good ideas and saw some good materials and systems. The rear found for the garage is 100% complete as of middle of last week, so I can start the block-work - I need 36 blocks to start it, I don't want a delivery of materials yet as they will get in the way so I went to TradePoint - 1 in stock! I enquired as to what was going on apparently the supplier as a shortage. I'll need to get along to the merchants this week and get them.

Not really done a lot of thinking yet to be honest, just at an early planning stage and consideration of some sort of insulation.

I figured it was a concrete saving initiative but I figured I would ask in case there was some special reason - access to your fallout shelter or something.

OK a bit far away - I could set you up with once used (for whisky) IBC's but transport would make them cost prohibitive at £50 a pop on a pallet line.

Well done. What are the excavated but not filled (boxed out with ply) parts of the trench about? I poured 2 mixed loads of concrete yesterday...