Today, as planned, I was left to my own devices so I could get the pieces cut out for the lift. Naturally, it rained, so out came the tarpaulin again to make my back yard into a makeshift tent.
After a lot of back-and-forth between the garage inside and the jigsaw outside, the pieces were finally cut into something approximating a reasonable fit.
Originally I had planned to use no screws or nails at all in construction, to minimise risk if someone fell on it, but I couldn't think of any sensible way to attach the lift walls to the supports in a reasonable timeframe, so I ended up using a small number of tiny wood screws. I would expect the lift itself to break away from the garage first if someone fell on it rather than pulling the walls off the lift, and even if the lift was pulled apart, the screws are all going into solid timber so they're unlikely to become exposed.
As well as the lift walls, I also used screws in the lift itself. I decided that only using glue to hold the floor of the lift on was asking for trouble, so the floor and ceiling are screwed into corner dowel rods. The walls will be glued to the outside of the dowels once they're painted. In the meantime the lift looks like a little cage.
Here's the lift shaft partially assembled, with the front sat next to it.
Now I have to paint everything. I may put a sign saying "LIFT" above each entrance, I'm not sure yet. All of the lift parts need painting, and of course the helipad does too, and also I need to fill the dowel holes on the underside of the garage and repaint it. So far the lift looks like this - everything has to be done in stages since I can't paint all sides of an object at once. Pesky gravity.
Once all of the paint has dried, I can glue everything together, glue the roof on, glue the whole lift to the garage itself, and then all I have to do is work out how to make a handle for the crank thing at the top and in theory it's finished.
2 days left.
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