The skies remained leaden over Tywyn this morning and had plenty more rain left to deposit in the yard, so the team assembled within the museum to tackle the remaining items on our winter works list.
Max Birchenough, Andy Sheffield, Charles Benedetto and John Olsen began by putting up the scaffold tower on the first floor so that we could safely access the beam at the head of the stairs to mount more commemorative headboards. John investigated the beam with an eye to fixing the mounts directly to it and discovered that this was another bogus beam consisting largely of air enclosed in a thin skin of plasterboard; concerned that the mounts could not be safely attached to the plasterboard the team was forced to rethink the attachment strategy.
As it was now 10:30am we decided to have our discussion over coffee and chocolate biscuits and we were joined by the duty attendant David Broadbent as no visitors had yet come into the museum.
Refreshed, and with an alternative plan, we returned to the museum to get the tools out to trim a length of plywood left over from a previous beam cladding exercise to repeat the process on this beam; using the known strong points to carry the weight of the plywood to which the mounts could be securely screwed. We took the plywood out onto the platform to perform the surgery and cut two pieces that will ultimately carry five headboards.
We had to stop at this point as we needed to disassemble the scaffold tower and stow away the tools so that visitors coming off the returning trains would not have these in their way. With the museum clear we left David to guide the first visitors of the day around the museum.
Photo by John Olsen