We had an eventful Saturday at Hotchley Hill, with an excellent turnout and plenty of progress.
Most pleasing of this was the installation of our new heavy-duty security door. It was waiting for us at Ruddington in a parcel, we were amused to note marked "fragile". That was belied by its weight as we loaded the van, before the party set off for Hotchley Hill.
Once there, we split into two groups, with five scrubbing-down and priming the big windowframes, and the remaining three getting stuck into the door.
With an early start, plenty of people and enough equipment, we had planned to get the primer on and fully dry before the weather changed. While the priming team worked at an impressive speed, British weather got the better of us, and some of the primer suffered from driving rain. The sheltered parts should be fine, but we will need to revisit the job.
Downstairs, we opened packages of locks, screws and bits of frame, and set about putting the new door together. This was uneventful for the most part - as you would hope from a well-designed kit, apart from the fate of the supplied masonry bit. This was patently not up to the job of drilling hard engineering brick, and more resembled a knitting needle by the time we'd finished!
In between all this, we had not one, but two visitors. The first from Loughborough S&T, to borrow the signalbox's diagram for scanning - and another from the LNER(GC)HT to discuss glazing.
As the rain got worse, half the team departed for Ruddington to catch up on a few odd jobs there, and dry out. The remainder tried out some new tools for working on the south Crittall door (most satisfactory) before packing away and calling it a day.
We locked up, with a very solid-sounding clunk from the new door, and headed back.
Several jobs of the "we'll finish it later" sort have accumulated over the past couple of weeks, so we'll be revisiting those next (weather allowing).
