october 2017 7 - m · pdf fileoctober 2017 7 monday outdoor walkers 6:30, st lucia talking...
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7 October 2017
Monday
Outdoor Walkers
6:30, St Lucia
Talking Books
9am to noon
2nd & 4th Mondays
Talking Tech
Computers
9 to noon
1st & 3rd Mondays
Bicycle Maintenance
1pm to 4pm
Book Club
1:30 to 3:30 at the
100 acre Bar
4th Monday
Garage Band music in
the afternoon
Tuesday
Indooroopilly S/Centre
Walkers
8am
IT & computers
9am till noon
Coffee and Chat
9am till noon
Woodworking
1pm till 5pm
Making things with
wood: with a saw,
hammer or a lathe
Building native bee
box hives, and bee
hotels. Come and join
in this money making
activity for the Shed
Wednesday
Outdoor Walkers
6:30, Chelmer and
Graceville
Committee Meeting
2nd Wednesday, 9am
Member’s Meeting
3rd Wednesday, 9am
Followed by a guest
speaker at 10am
Investment &
Superannuation
4:30 to 5:30pm
This month, 2nd
Wednesday
Cinema At The Shed
CATS
Last Wednesday of the
month, at 7:15pm
Thursday
Indooroopilly S/Centre
Walkers
8am
Social Chat Group
9am till noon
Wood Turning
1pm till 5pm.
And bee hive building
Friday
Outdoor Walkers
6:30, Taringa
Drawing with Des
9am till 10am
Bicycle Maintenance
9am to noon.
Ukulele
Fortnightly, 10am at
the Scout Hall
Kenmore
Open Mic
4pm to 7pm
Activity Co-ordinators
Bicycle Maintenance: Alan Baker, [email protected]
Book Club: Garth Forster, [email protected]
Computers: Harry Howchin, [email protected]
Drawing: Des Derrington, [email protected]
Guest Speakers: Pieter Scheelings, [email protected]
Investment & Super: John Gardner,
Garage Band Music: Ross Knox. [email protected]
Open Mic: Ross Knox, [email protected]
Talking Books: Frank Denham, [email protected]
Talking Tech: Frank Denham, [email protected]
Ukulele: Bob Barker, [email protected]
Outdoor Walking: Les deKretser, [email protected]
Woodwork: Garth Forster, [email protected]
CATS: Frank Denham, [email protected]
Workshop Training: Paul Dunstan, [email protected]
Sausage Sizzles: Seton Porter, [email protected]
“What’s Up” a weekly news to keep up to date and a reminder of events in the coming week.
[email protected] www.mensshedindooroopilly.com
Ph 3878 2185 60 Stamford Road, P.O Box 74, Indooroopilly, Q 4068
Proudly Sponsored by the National Australia Bank
Guest Speakers Program,
presented by Pieter Scheelings.
Guest Speakers are invited to the
Shed to speak after each
Member’s meeting on the 3rd
Wednesday of the month.
18 October, Hearing health in the community.
Anastasia Roberts from Australian Hearing
15 November, Queensland Rail. More information to come.
TBA: Rae Plush from Continence Foundation. Risk problems with
bladder and bowel
TBA: Kara Gerritson from the Heart Foundation. Topics related to
heart disease.
Latest goings on at the Shed
The first outing for the Food and Wine appreciation
group went off very well. We dined at My Thai in
Auchenflower, a very nice venue with good service
and an interesting spread of Thai dishes served as a set
menu.
Paul is on the look-out for the next outing.
Bunnings Sausage Sizzles
We have done very well with our sausage sizzles at Bunnings, raising a lot of money for the Shed. 27
September was our best mid-week sizzle so far, school holidays would have helped there, but the next week,
4 October was rather slow. Back at school I guess.
We settle down to a regular 1st and 4th Wednesday of the month now till Christmas. Not a big impost on the
members, but an excellent cash flow for the Shed.
Please put your name up to help on these Sizzles. It is only a 3 or 4 hour commitment to help the Shed get
better and safer equipment to work with.
As you may have noticed on the first page, we now have sponsorship of the Newsletter from the NAB bank.
They have signed up for a year. We have a crew working away at chasing up sponsorship for the Shed, if
you have any suggestions please let Les know.
I must apologise for the lateness of this newsletter, and the absence of the weekly What’s Up last week. I
am having a few medical hassles at the moment that haven’t helped. On the mend now it seems.
The Indoor Walking group leave the shed at 8am
on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They wander around
the shopping centre then finish up with a cup of
coffee. Approximately 3.5km.
Talking Tech meet on alternate Monday mornings
and chat about anything technical, digital or
otherwise. Bring along your problem and they can
probably fix it for you.
The Bicycle Maintenance group meets Monday
afternoons, and on a Friday morning as well, to try
and move the build-up of bikes in the Shed.
The Investment & Superannuation group meets
at 4:30pm on the first Wednesday of the month.
John brings along interesting articles to share, as
you can too.
Talking Books meet alternate Monday mornings to
review books they have read.
Tuesday Chat, every Tuesday morning is a busy
time at the Shed. Come along and have your say.
Thursday Chat as well.
Cinema At The Shed, CATS, runs a classic movie
on the last Wednesday of the month at 7:15pm.
Look out for the notice in the What’s Coming Up.
Hopefully this will be running again now that Frank
is back on board.
Wood work has been covered elsewhere. There
are a few small personal projects on the go, Chris
completed another Campaign Chair, Paul a table
top for his Wok burner, Bob a top for something
musical.
Tradesmen
Do you have a good tradesman that you can recommend? Recently we were looking for plumbers and
electrician.
I am looking for someone to do some tidying up in my garden, as well as take a few small branches down
before a storm does.
Email in your trusty tradesmen and we will list these guys so others can be helped out.
Membership is now up to around 148. A lot of these new members are a result of our recent Open Day.
There is plenty to do at the Shed, in the workshop, or in the meeting rooms.
Workshop jobs at present are Native Bee Hives, Insect/Bee Hotels, Strangler Fig boxes for the BCC, and yet
to start, boxes/nests for Microbats and the like.
Additionally, last year we made up 20 “Zonta Ladies” for the Zonta Club to use in their campaign against
domestic violence. Some of the paint work on those need touching up and I (Seton)will be starting on that
soon. They would like us to make another 20 of these too, the ones last year were a great success. To make
these plywood profiles, we use the Over-Head Router. This is an interesting bit of kit and the imagination
can run wild thinking about what we can make with that tool. Stick around!
Some of the work going on in the work shop.
Ode to a ladder.
In the beginning there was a patio door surrounded by a narrow
strip of wall in my study. Having too many books in the house
that my wife and I could not bear to part with, I decided to build a
bookcase around the doorway, extending up to the ceiling. This
worked very well until age caught up with my wife and I –
standing on a small stepladder to reach the upper shelves was
becoming rather scary.
So, after much procrastination, I recently decided to design and
make a library ladder to give safer access to the upper levels of
the bookcase. A search of the Internet showed many examples of
library ladders, frequently using very similar reproduction
Victorian-era hardware which did not suit my house, which is in
the ‘Modern’ style. Instead I chose a fairly heavy-duty (100 Kg)
aluminium sliding door track set suitable for my 2.8 metre wide
bookshelf.
Before laying a hand on my tools I gave quite a bit of thought to the potential design and construction
problems that might arise, and there were a few. For example, to achieve its purpose the ladder must be
designed to be safe for a pair of 70 year-olds to use (but only one at a time of course!), be light enough to
roll across the 3 metre width of the shelves, be easy to climb, and look attractive. Also, the ladder would sit
at an acute angle to the wall, requiring careful measurements because in this situation the effect of small
errors is magnified.
Of course, the near-vertical angle of the ladder meant that most of the combined weight of the ladder and its
passenger would be borne by the bottom wheels, and only a little by the overhead track and rollers, but
better to be safe than sorry. I cut the track to length and made up some flat metal brackets to join the track to
the edge of the bookshelf at about 2.1 metres above the floor.
I happened to have a nice 2.5 metre plank of 40 mm thick European Beech that had been planed flat on both
faces, so I decided to use it for the project. I then thought about the treads. As the room is only 2.4 metres
high, climbing the ladder to much above about waist height was unnecessary, so I decided to have only 4
treads, and to install three 25 mm diameter rungs above the treads to act as hand holds (and to discourage
mountain climbers). To make the climb a little easier for our old legs I reduced the spacing between the
treads and rungs to 250 mm. I then chose a pair of 75 mm diameter rubber-rimmed castors for the sideways-
facing wheels at the bottom of the ladder. Finally, at the top of the ladder I needed a substantial cross-piece
to hold the brackets on which the ladder would hang from the track.
I figured that the side rails needed to be about 80 mm wide, so I biscuit-jointed two 30 mm strips of the 40
mm plank together to make each rail. I then had to decide how far the ladder should protrude from the
shelves, which was an easy decision because the shelves were set in a 600 mm deep wall recess. Allowing
for the 200 mm depth of the bookshelf where the track was to be installed, the ladder would slope at about
15 degrees if the base of the ladder would sit tidily just inside its alcove.
Once I knew the angle and length of the ladder, I could mark out and cut the dado slots (as they are called)
for the treads, the blind holes for the rungs, and the U-shaped cutouts at the floor ends of the rails for the
wheels, the axles of which had to be tilted so that the wheels sat vertical when the ladder was in place.
Then I made the treads, which I thought needed some grooves for a safe grip, which I made with three
passes over a moulding cutter head fitted to my table saw. I then tilted the blade of the table saw, and with
each tread held in a tapered jig, made a compound cut at each of the front corners so that they tapered neatly
to meet the rail.
After temporarily fitting a wheel to a side rail, I could measure exactly (well, almost) where the upper cross
piece needed to be, so that the ladder sat at the correct angle when the track brackets when mounted on the
cross-piece met the track rollers. Then I crossed my fingers and cut the dado slots for the cross-piece,
because a serious error here would be difficult to fix.
To assemble the ladder I decided to use wood screws recessed into 10 mm holes along the rails to fix the
treads and cross-piece, and just 22 mm diameter blind holes about 15 mm deep for the rungs, which had a
shoulder turned at each end to hide the join. I thought that the ladder would look interesting if the nice
Beech grain on the treads and rungs was visible, so I gave them several coats of clear finish, whilst the rails
were painted an off-white that matched the study walls. I then filled the screw holes with plugs cut from the
beech timber, but left them unpainted as a contrast to the white rails.
Assembling the ladder on the track was straightforward because the brackets were designed to slip onto the
roller bolts before locking the in place with a plastic retainer. But as luck would have it, I found that I had
slightly mis-calculated the height and position of the brackets on the cross-piece, because the back of the
cross-piece was catching on the shelf uprights. After a bit of thought, I fitted a packing piece under the
bracket to ensure that the cross-piece cleared the shelf uprights. Lastly I found that the floor was rather
uneven, and I needed to compensate for this by packing some of the track mounting brackets. Aah, now I
can finally enjoy using our new library ladder to access those books on the top two shelves!
An interesting article by John Gardner, one of our founding members.