Another 8 people on site today, it must be the hot weather that brings them out (or is it the good company?)
This enabled us to attack the platform on several levels:

First of all, you need a lot of mortar. We made sure there was a steady stream today. Here is Paul about throw a Herculean shovelful into the mixer, with John shrinking away to avoid the inevitable splashback out of the drum. Paul did the sand and cement, while John was responsible for the precise amount of water in the mix. Last week, one load of mix was sent back from the coal face for being to dry, and the next was also sent back for being too wet. No more ! Here's how:

We now add the water by the tea cup full. A little at a time, from a bucket, until the consistency is just right. A little like making cake mix, I suppose.

Couldn't we just throw in the whole bucketful? No, because we are perfectionists and want to get the consistency just right.

Down on the coal face, two barrows of muck have arrived. The first one of brown is for the concrete blocks, which were lifted on to the concrete slab poured last week. This row went on amazingly quickly, as we have now developed a system whereby one team puts the block on a bed of mortar, while second team fills in the gaps with runny mortar afterwards. In this way the 120m stretch soon filled up with blocks. The second barrow was one of black, with which Bob laid two rows of blues along the front - the first row is shown in the picture; a row of facers followed afterwards, as well as a tower on the end for next week.

Here the blocks are in, and Pete has just started on a layer of reds to back up behind the blues that Bob laid. In the middle is Derek, who was 'asked' to clean a complete pallet of second hand reds of the very light mortar that clung to them. Boring and repetitious, but also useful and in good company. The pallet of blues leaning precipitously in the middle was also shifted along a bit, via the PWay trolley. Easily said....

Here is an example of one such brick shifting activity. The bricks in question are second hand and part of the same lot that came from Broadway. Jolly useful they are too. But they need to be put in the right place. Rather than walk them over to the back, it was decided to do an 'aerial ' transfer. (I throw this brick, you catch it, mate)

At the end of the day.

At the end of the day, we had achieved a row of blocks, two rows of blues and a double row of reds on the 120m section. In addition, we laid a slab of concrete all the way along the 130m section, which will be the foundation for the start of this next section the following week. The 110m section, the first new one, received a magnificent three rows of blues, but last Wednesday. This completely escaped your blogger's notice, no offence intended. It means that after backing up, corbelling can start on the 110m section. Not long before we can tick this one off.

As you can gether, there was quite a lot of brick moving about today. However, there were also other logistical moves required:

I hate to say this, but does it look like fun rather than work?

 We had to quickly gather up Pete's canopy painting scaffold and lock it up in the container, to protect it from unfriendly eyes. The same was necessary with our supply of 25 10m drainage pipes:

These has been delivered a few weeks back, and stored in the grass along the rear of the platform, ready for use. They were no longer safe there, because...

... we were very disappointed to discover that someone had broken open three of the four pallets of second hand bricks brought down from Broadway, and taken most of them. We couldn't believe our eyes, who would do that??? Further investigation revealed that someone had also tipped out the contents of the dumpy bag used to collect the metal strips from the new brick pallets and taken the bag, while our scrap pile had been rifled through and anything heavy removed. Bizarre, or what?

Visitors to CRC.

We can also report that adjacent to CRC2, about a dozen caravans have appeared....

Back next week !