The quarter is half-way over after the excitement of Arts Walk and the success of our chalkboards we are pushing forward with the next phases of our project. Specifically we are continuing to solidify our archway designs, and hope to soon begin construction. Mike Szramek, a local engineer, has donated much time and effort to help us ensure that the product will be secure and up to code standards. He and several members of the group have been working on architectural plans for the archways. These engineered designs and calculations will allow us to get the height variance we have requested from the city.
Currently we are pursuing two main sources for the wood. One is a stockpile of new cedar that was donated to Evergreen, and another is the left-over wood from a deconstruction project on campus. Gaining access to these materials has proved difficult but we are finally making headway and hope to know by the end of the week.
While waiting for final say about the wood we are also refocusing some energy on the idea of a rainwater catchment system of downspouts and planters. Because we want to encourage use of the alley as a pedestrian walkway, standing water is one of our major concerns. To address the large area of pooling water that occurs in the alley we are looking into installing rain-barrels under the downspouts for capturing and containing of run-off from the Patrico Building. We are considering perhaps diverting it out of the alley to areas with better drainage.
The chalkboards continue to be a hit downtown. While we have had isolated instances of responses being written with permanent media, we've pretty much "chalked" that up to people's excitement to contributing to the wall that they couldn't wait for us to restock the real chalk. Speaking of that, chalk donations are happily accepted, and at this point they can be deposited directly on the alley floor (a chalk storage box is currently in the works as well).
We are always looking for other donations as well, in fact we have set up a paypal account (linked on the right) where you are invited to make monetary contribution to help fund the continuance of our project. All money received will be used for alley revitalization including but not limited to, material acquisition (ie. chalk, paint, wood, hardware, rain-barrels, etc.), paying for the archway permit, and maintenance. Your support is greatly appreciated!
For the past few weeks we have worked on milling the wood. We have been in the shop at Evergreen cutting the old 12x6s down to size using the band saw. The band saw we were using we pretty much pushed to capacity trying to mill the enormous beams. We tried a couple different strategies to get straight cuts, including using gates and chalk-lines. We struggled with the blade bending and pushing the wood off course. Eventually we tried scoring the cut lines with a skill saw before running the beams through the band saw. Using the scores as our guides we made the long cuts with greater ease.
From the smaller pieces we shaped the beams and wings for our archway using electric handsaws. We measured the angles we needed for the wings, created a gate by clamping a square metal rod to the wood, and once again scored with a skill saw. Then we used a saws-all to expand the cut through the wood. With the same process and tools we trimmed the ends to the correct length.
