Beer

Brewed around 45l of pride today, partly using the home grown brewers gold hops.  The recipe calls for 170g, of which 60g is this year's crop, 10g last years, stored in the freezer.

Gates

Bought the gates and the pillars today for the driveway, plus more 10mm re-bar for the post hole.  And polystyrene as an expansion gap.  The 800mm bar, made up in a 100x100mm square, is sunk 400mm into the footings.  The 400mm remaining was welded onto another 1200mm to give a nominal 1500mm reinforcing.  This does mean that you need to lift the blocks over it, and they ain't light.

24/9 spend a day measuring, cutting & welding brackets for the gates, plus the 'stop' in the middle of the drive.  The gates are suspended in the metal tubing by some awful plastic devices that look like drilled out plastic feet you find on office desks.  One has failed a bit and been tweaked.  I can see that this will need to be replaced by a piece of steel, welded in.  The gates are not designed for outward manual opening and you can't open them from the inside presently.  Once the motors are on, these problems will go.

1/11/13 added a controller so the Hormann remotes now control the gates too.

Stats.  Each pillar element is 15kg.  6 elements = 90kg.  Each pillar is filled with about 100l/240kg of concrete.  The foundations are about 64l/150kg (0.4m3).  So each pillar is around 480kg.  The gates weigh 18kg each. Over engineering?  Wish I'd put in a steel post, but it ain't done like that over here.