This past weekend's Adult Work Party was a productive one! The weather wasn't great, but luckily most of the work was inside. The inside of the trading post was painted Thursday and Friday morning so we could start putting up light fixtures and installing switches and receptacles. It took the better part of two days to put in all the fixtures, mostly due to the fact that we had to improvise a lot. The lights we have are very nice; 6 bulbs facing down and 3 facing up. They're hung with cables that come out of the top. The only problem is that the cable mounts in the center of the top and the bulb sits in the center of the top. See a problem there? Luckily we have a metal fab expert (and his new apprentice) who spent most of the day making custom brackets to hang the fixtures. They look so good that some people thought they came with the fixtures originally. In addition to that, the end caps were all sized differently (which required some drilling and filing to correct). Once we got them all installed, which took until 9 pm Saturday plus all of Sunday morning, we turned them on only to find that the quick-connect plugs were miswired at the factory and the top of some light up with the bottom of others. So this week, I'll be taking them all apart and rewiring them. Oh, and we didn't check bulb colors when we were putting them up, so we'll have to play musical bulbs until everything matches. But since they were donated, it's worth a little extra work for the great cost savings. Plus it was a good excuse for Ralph to show Chris some welding tricks. It was a long haul, but we got everything installed after 9 hours of work Friday, 12.5 on Saturday, and 8 on Sunday. I don't think I've ever slept that long after a work party!
Another ongoing project is the remodeling of MBC. Greg Hammond spent yesterday crawling around under the deck, finding lots of "how-did-that-stay-up-for-so-long" construction flaws. When the deck was added, it was nailed into the building without joist hangers and without a post supporting it. Then, the outside wall was built on top of that. So the deck was slowly sinking and in turn the wall and roof were on their way down. But now, an extra beam and some pier blocks mean that we can finish up the framing and start work on plumbing and electrical.
Alan and his crew are working on plans to remodel the basement of the museum. With so much history and more and more pictures being added every month, we've finally run out of wall space upstairs. This weekend, we got the downstairs completely empty so we can spruce up the floor and add some partial walls like we did upstairs a couple years ago. I'm glad we have people who are so dedicated to constantly improving and adding to the museum so future scouts can see the history of camp.
From various posts on Facebook, it sounds like some areas got a dusting of snow last night. It's nice and sunny here at camp, though, so I guess that means it's a perfect day for some trench-digging and grading around the building. The air conditioning people are coming today to finish their part, then after some sanding of beams and minor light fixture modifications we'll be ready to start scrubbing the floor to get it ready to finish.
No comments:
Post a Comment