Storm damage
9 01 2008
With winds gusting to 80mph today, it wasn’t surprising that we suffered some damage here and there. One of the hen houses had its Stirling board and tar-paper roof torn off, leaving the insides exposed to the elements. It’s not occupied at the moment so I’ll drag it into one of the outbuildings tomorrow and put a new roof on it.
The inward-opening side gate blew out, snapping the stile and bowing the 2×4 crossbars at the top and the bottom. This is all the more impressive because the gate was closed, latched and held shut with a boulder on the inside, so it didn’t slam shut. Instead, the wind simply blew it through the opening. On top of that, the inside of the steading is relatively sheltered as it’s dug into the hill and the outbuildings act as a windbreak against the type of north-westerlies that did the damage. The wind in the exposed fields and pens was much, much worse. We also had a few damaged trees but the camera batteries were too discharged to take a photo. All in all, we got off lightly.
Don’t forget to add that that gate also needs a good shove to open it!
sorry to here about your storm damage stoney, we got off lightly just one dead conifer snapped.
I’ve just spent a very chilly 30 minutes disassembling parts of the chicken hut and found that the problem wasn’t the construction, but the screws. Most of the screws holding the roof timbers together had snapped, while the softwood timbers that made up the frame and the Stirling board that covered it are largely intact.
It wasn’t a paltry number of lightweight screws either. There were eight 4×45mm diameter wood screws to each of the long sides, and four to the short.
Once again I find myself dealing with consequences of modern shoddy and cheap manufacturing processes.
It reminds me of the time I contacted the manufacturer of a batch of galvanised, mild steel 10×100mm coach screws to complain about them snapping and was told “they’re not intended for heavy duty use”. What are they for? Decoration? (Actually, that’s what the lady on the phone told me - they should be used for decorative effects!)