Little things that make a big impact....

Welcome back to another video, folks. It's day three, working with William. We're getting onto the decking today in the middle of our messy yard. So we'll take you with you on a day's work. Okay, main tools for getting started with decking. We've got long bits that go into this camo decking tool. So you pinch this onto the decking board and it gives you angled screws so we can hide the screws so we can work opposite each other with a screwdriver. Each got a drill for the very ends to stop cracking. We've got the special decking screws. We've got a chalk line to make sure we get a nice neat center line. Spare batteries, probably. We'll try cutting the circle with the jigsaw. I think that will actually be more useful than using the circular saw. We'll see how that goes. We'll get cracking. We've come up put a chalk line down here. Can't really see very well, but that's to give us a dead center line. And then we're going to start to see if we can get into a workflow using the tool and screwing each plank on Sakur dog. Hey, Saku. Saka's looking out for deer. So a few boards in. Running into problems. Trouble is, you many use the same brand screws. We're not. We're using some other brand. And what it's doing, it's leaving the head of the screw just poking out when it should sit in flush. So we're having to a do a double movement where we have to take this off and drive the last bit in. And it's jamming this tool in because we've got the screw sticking out pressing against the next board. It makes it a bit annoying taking this out, but it's basically doubling the time it takes. It does leave a nice finish. Happy with that. But little niggles. My fault for not checking that out before. That's frustrating. Silly Richard. Okay, nice progress. Good flat floor. Beautiful. But obviously, when we get to this end as well as that end, there's nothing holding the beams up. So what I'm going to do is cut some sort of triangle pieces like this. And to save me working it out mathematically because it's too early in the morning for that. You see, I've got to bridge this gap. And this gap I've just measured out the arc. It's going to be 7.2 meters diameter, and I can see the board underneath. So I've measured out. So I need 27 and two, 21 and a half for each side. I'll go and cut them up and we'll use brackets to hold them up and that will give us something to hold up the edge pieces. So on second thoughts, I'm going to add another little one. You see the arc here, here I've got easy support there and there and there, but nothing right at the end. So I'm going to make little ones that are offset from the main structure. That should do the job. Yeah. So you get an idea of how the end supports will be. I've got two shorter ones. I just don't know mathematically exactly where they go. But you can see the corner is going to arc out to here. So probably I'll stick them there. The end of the board there is going to be difficult to support, but I'll probably use a metal bracket right at the very end. So just marking out the first arc of the circle. Just going to check that below each corner is lining up good. There's a lot of cutting to do on a curved board into the grain like that. It's going to take a while to go around here. Gonna see which is better, the skil saw or the jigsaw. It's hard to tell. Some of the boards are very dense. But if I get underneath and see the corners, for example, I just want to know that I'm clear always of the structure underneath and that will give us better measurements for how to support these end boards with this structure. Like so. So cut the first quarter just to check on these ends. That seems to work pretty well. That's a stable solid end. I can easily put my weight on that and wasn't so bad. The skil saw doesn't cut so good, but the jigsaw goes around okay. So I think we'll use that as the working method. Starting to really see it come to life. This is a vole. This is what eats our trees. They fall over in the spring when the ground thaws. What should we do with him? We'll let him go. We'll let him live. Part of the forest habitat. Just don't go and eat our trees. Alright mate? Don't eat our trees. You're a bit shocked, aren't you? Okay, starting second sides slow going. Partly because of the mistake I made with the screws that need to be put down again. You see, you've just got to tuck screws back in, but not really. It's slow work anyway. But you see it's coming together very nice. Beautiful. I've Just been up cutting some 45 degree stabilizers. We'll have to do this for all of them, certainly when their legs are, you know, up in the air on one side just to make sure this weight is all stabilized. So we'll chalk these into the between the legs and the platform to stabilize them up. Okay, so added some diagonals. Now, obviously it's not so easy to do on that corner, but I've added them wherever I can and that stiffened up the platform tremendously. So that's now officially done on the subframe. Everything's secured down, everything stabilized. Nothing can move. So turns out I underestimated the plankage that we need. We basically only get to use two or three off cut bits. So going to get the tractor out, bring up another load for this teepee deck, and then we'll also need loads for the next ones. I think we'll struggle even to do two of these in a day. It's painstakingly slow work, but it is producing a very, very nice finish. And now we've ironed out how to do the ends, etcetera, that's pretty much it. These will obviously have stairs built, and we thought carefully about where the entrances will be to create a bit of privacy with the next tent. But this one will be on this side. But we will get to stairs another time. That's not so important. Let's get in the deck, set. It. All right, we got a load up. I'm scared to carry any more than that because it's pretty steep and not such a heavy weight on the back. But that should be enough to finish this platform. Probably we have to go for lunch before that. Sam. Okay, so we've been eating out for lunch and we found longer bits. Downside of these is they're too long. So we're just going to have to either mark them or find something we can weld on or stick on to make our own stoppers. If we just screw all the way down, that will go right through the board. But it's a big difference than what we had because it will stop the tool jamming. And it will also mean we don't have to go back and screw the screws in. Okay. Come back after lunch. Longer bits. Okay, we're on a roll now. Having the right bit, the tool doesn't get stuck. Screws go in the right depth. Much better. This should speed things up 30, 40%. It's. Basically that is all we're doing all day. Well, Richie's little mistake cost us quite a bit of time. A couple of hours, I reckon. Not so much. I mean, the time is less important, but the frustration of having to yank that thing out. Just, you know, it's a little thing that just bites at you every time when you're doing it thousands of times. No good. So looking good. I expect we can get a start on the next one, but we certainly won't get it finished today. But pretty neat. Really cool to see it coming together. Had to leave a bit of room for the tree to grow. Obviously the tree will continue to grow, so that will either get felled out or will just extend. We've got another, I reckon six to ten years for that, so that's no problem. Well, there you go. It's been long. It's taken till 4 o' clock to get this far. But the result is very, very nice. A lot of hiccups. I made that silly mistake. Just put it onto a wide angle for you. I made that silly mistake with getting the wrong bits. Just not thinking that they, you know, I just assumed they were all standardized. But it's a very nice deck and it's properly level. It's just very much how I hope things would be. Look at that. Perfect. So we've got some stabilizations in the corners. This thing feels solid and it's not going anywhere for a long time. So. Very happy with that. We're going to build some stairs another time. Possibly coming up here. This one is going to have stairs. Maybe on the far left. It's a nice view looking out that way. Nice. It's going to take us a while. So I think my estimation of being done with them all by Sunday is out the window. I reckon we could be done with all the ones up in the forest by Sunday, provided we find a good way to get the decking boards up to the yurts, because it's a huge amount of timber to carry otherwise. But we'll see them. Seeing if he can be available next week to help out. I'm going to have to get on with the eggmobiles and putting together Bruno's nests that he sent me. So we're trialing them out. We'll do a video about bird flu and possibilities with that soon because the bird flu epidemic seems worse than normal. This. There's a big chance it will go on into the summer, which will affect everyone here. There's been 12, 13 cases, I believe, and big facilities, having to cull a couple of million birds already. So it's. It's a big one and it's, you know, there's not so many options for small producers like ourselves, but we'll talk about that in another video. For now, we want to focus the next few days on getting more of these platforms together. I think you'll agree it's a stunning result. I'm really happy about it. Okay, got a little bit of progress on this one. Got all the timber up, so a bit of logistics still bringing materials up. However, we're in a good position tomorrow. I think we can have this one and the one up here done and that will be a good end to the week. So bit of fiddling around, silly mistake by not checking that the tool and screws and the decking tool are compatible. But glad we found a solution now. It's much more useful and it's definitely quicker, but it's the ease of use that's just makes it a joy. Now it was a bit of a pain before, so I've got plenty of timber up here that should be enough for this deck and that leaves us in a good position. All right. So well, hope you find that interesting and useful. It's good to know things that don't go as well as well as the things that do go well, but nice outcome and good progress. Still so happy with the day. I probably won't make videos for the next few days documenting the same sort of process, although I might, you know, capture any things that come up and things that feel like they're worth sharing. I think by my new estimation tomorrow we could have had all three TVs done. If we work over the weekend, I expect we could get the two yurts done, but then it's going to go into next week to set up the really big decks and build them up. So we'll see. Hopefully William will be available to help me out and that's a great help for me to be able to push things forward. Next week I'll also start tackling the eggmobiles I hope, because we've got to get them up to speed as well with the new nest boxes. Thank you so much for watching as always folks. And people keep emailing me daily about the Ridgedale Builds book. All of these things are in that as well as about 30 odd different structures. We're probably 2/3 of the way through. There's a bunch of riding and editing to do as well. So it still will be a few weeks, but we'll hopefully make launch a crowdsource campaign in three or four weeks time, hopefully to see if people really want to get behind that book. Thanks as always folks. I'm feeling a bit beat. Done for the day. See you in a video soon.