Powder Coating

Having decided on timber windows with powder-coated aluminium exteriors, it was not a big leap to then think about powder-coated
fascia boards. We even have a RAL colour. We drew up shortlists, took the ones that we both agreed on and haggled down to – 6004 blue green. As an aside, do not look for RAL colours online. What with different rendering between devices and poor translation from RAL to RGB/CMYK, it is inconsistent & misleading. We bought a physical RAL K7 Classic colour swatch and were aghast at the difference.

We need to be able to handle chunky lengths of aluminium around 2m long. Ric has specced out a design for a) an oven that will cook them at 180c and b) a bending machine . We will start ordering stuff as soon as we get on site in April. For the oven, we need…

• 0.7mm aluminium sheets 1250 x 2500 to form the oven casing
• 100mm loft insulation to insulate the oven
• strapping to hold the insulation in place
• a 2kW heater and a fan, to heat the oven & spread the heat
• a PID temperature controller and associated bits, to regulate the temperature
• a thermometer, to go at the other end of the oven from the controller, to show when the whole oven is at temperature
• a ‘D’ format kettle lead and connector
• cables, screws etc. to construct the oven and wire in the electrics
• fencing wire, to suspend the aluminium inside the oven as it cooks

The folding machine has a fixed part that the sheet of aluminium is held on and a moving part that pivots round 90 degrees, to bend the aluminium round a sharp angle. It is a fairly standard bit of workshop kit, but ours will be larger than average. We need…

• a 2.7m length of 127x76x13 I beam (UB) for the piece that pivots up
• a 2.7m length of 203x102x23 I beam (UB) for the piece that holds the sheet in place
• a 2.7m length of 75x75x8mm angle to fold the sheet around
• 4 lengths of scaffolding tube to use as legs
• weld-on hinges to attach the two lengths of I beam together i.e. to create the pivot point
• bolts to hold it together

We will probably use 0.5mm aluminium sheeting for the fascia and 0.7mm for the windows. The primer and powder coating both come in handy 20kg packs – we might just get away with one of each. We will doubtless have to improvise a bit to get the whole thing working.

Whilst on aluminium sheet, we have changed our minds on heating the up-stairs areas of the steading. The building warrant expects us to use radiators, we now want under-floor heating. The only practical way to do this without using up room height is to use aluminium spreader plates under the floor boards, with 50mm PIR insulation under the plates. However, commercially-manufactured plates are not designed for using heat pumps (35c water, requiring 100mm pipe spacing) on floors with joists at 600mm centres. We reckon we can make our own, more cheaply than getting someone else to make them up for us as a ‘special’. We are not sure whether we will need a separate folding machine.

Getting ready to move up to Aberdeenshire!

Andy retires on 5th April 2019, our house is on the market (but probably awaiting the outcome of the big ‘B’) and we are winding down after rather more than 34 years living in Suffolk. We will stop off in Manchester, where Jill will run her first marathon. The following day we drive up to Aberdeen.

We have booked a luton van to get the next lot of stuff up to Aberdeen. Mostly into next-door’s big shed to be precise. The load we took up over Christmas was a long-wheel-base panel van and seemed pretty vast, but we still have a lot more to move. It has nominally double the packing space. We looked at a 7.5 tonne truck to do a single move but they are disproportionately expensive – much cheaper to hire two luton vans. So we will do a run up from Suffolk in mid-March and will hire another van in Aberdeen for early April to do a run down to Suffolk. Any stuff left over will have to stay until we have sold the house.

We have a list of 77 organisation to contact to either cancel services from, or to change our address. We expect not to have a BT landline for a while, so we will lose out BTinternet email addresses after 60 days.