Large Scale Meccano

I only ever had one small set of Meccano as a kid. I was more into Lego and the large solid structures it could build.
That has now come back to haunt me. I really wish I had a #7 set when I was young. It would have made the last few days a lot easier.

What does this have to do with the Dung Heap you ask? Its time to assemble the greenhouse. RC and I spent the best part of a week getting the foundations down and letter perfect. For the purists its within 1.5mm in each dimension, less than 1mm out of square and within 1mm of level across each of the 2metre sides. Damn impressive I'd say.

The brick plinth

The Meccano starts to go together.

The instructions call for assembling the bulk of the frame before mounting on the plinth. If I was to do another one, I'd start with it on the plinth rather than try to carry the thing and jockey it into position.

The glass panels for the roof and vents go on next. Again, if I was to build another I would start by glazing the gable ends first to keep everything square. Those vent windows are bloody heavy.

The rest of the wall glazing in place. The floor is down too, as is the slate chippings between the greenhouse and fence.

Before putting on the side glass panels we needed to finish off the floor. After much deliberation we settled on using Bradstone carpet stones. These are basically concrete setts that look like granite but are connected by a plastic webbing. You just lay them down like carpet tiles on a compacted sand base. Brush in some mortar mix, sprinkle with water and voila. One solid yet slightly and deliberately uneven cobblestone floor. Another really good job by RC.

Another thing I would have done differently would be to glaze the ends first to keep them square. We found that after the frame went up there was some twisting of the end gable sections. This I'm assuming was caused by the weight of the roof panels and the delay in getting the sides on, coupled with the heavy winds we've been having. We ended up needing to disassemble the ends and rebuild them square and plumb again. The twisting wasn't visible until we put the doors on, when we could see they were out of position by about 2cm.

This shows just how solid this thing is. It ain't one of  your el-cheapo-crapo DIY store greenhouses.

Hartley Botanic make a very nice greenhouse. Their instruction sheets need work though.

Doors on and the outside is finally complete.

Autovent, err venting. Just have to get the staging and shelves assembled.

During the final bits of assembly yesterday we had an interloper checking things out.

This is a Red Admiral butterfly.  Quite common and very friendly.

Thank's to http://www.britishbutterflies.co.uk/ for making the identification easy.

Next on the list is how to dispose of all the bloody bubble & shrink wrap the parts came in.