Chapter 13: Dynabolts, and other things that shouldn’t be messed with.
Left to right: CT (off camera), Smash, Jackson & Josh discussing the importance of getting the first portal square.
We met CT, our shed building saviour at the block the next weekend. He was a character, alright, full of funny tales and swagger. True to his name, he turned up for work in a cowboy shirt and hat and some very groovy looking jeans (but worryingly, no tape measure or tools). We sat down at the outdoor dining table and handed over the dreaded manual. I was nervous, couldn’t sit still, couldn’t bear to see the moment when CT turned from confident saviour to doubting Thomas. I went to the kitchen tent to make coffee for everyone, and by the time I came back, the manual was face down on the table and CT was gossiping about musicians. I looked at Josh for information. He gave me a shrug face. Smash was enjoying himself – he loves gossiping and has plenty of his own backstage stories to tell. The sun shone down on our convivial gathering, quite high in the sky. The manual fluttered in a passing breeze. Coffee was drunk, cups taken away. I stared pointedly at the concrete slab and picked up the manual, started flicking through it again. Finally, CT and Smash exhausted their back catalogue of music festival blether and rose from the table.
CT had an unusual working style – for one thing he didn’t use a tool belt, which meant he was constantly roaming around the slab, looking for a shifter, or tape measure or hammer, in the process getting easily distracted into conversation. He also saw no point in referring to the manual, as it was all a load of shit and he knew what he was doing. The first job was to get one portal frame assembled and square. Along with the other four portals, this was the backbone of the entire shed and it needed to be totally square, so that all the other portal frames that followed could be built (and totally square) using the first as a template. Josh said the word ‘squared’ a lot and it was the one aspect of the manual that he agreed with – it made sense. CT however, told us that we should just leave all the bolts loose and tighten them up once the portal frames were all up, which kinda made sense, but seemed a bit laissez faire.
Smash and I were inclined to go with Josh on this issue, and with many other issues that came up, like whether or not the concrete dust in the drilled Dynabolt hole should be blown out before the Dynabolt* went in. CT thought not. Waste of time. Josh looked concerned. Onsite tensions mounted. CT was such a likeable chap, and supposedly a registered builder; we were paying him $100 an hour to get the job done, and he seemed so darned confident. It was a bit like getting drawn into doing drugs with the cool kid.
As usual, I abandoned the work site and went to cook something. I wasn’t being much help on the concrete pad, chewing my nails, watching Josh’s face in the same way I watch airline stewards’ faces during a rough flight. I made curries, tidied the kitchen, went up the hill to check messages. While I was up the hill, I googled: ‘Should you blow concrete dust out of a Dynabolt hole’ and settled back in the Nissan’s driver’s seat to read the results. Talk about a hot topic! There are some very passionate builders, handypersons and hobbyists out there. While following an increasingly argumentative thread on a Whirlpool forum, I swirled down and down into the frightening underbelly of Dynabolt extraction. Forget about the issue of dust, trying to get the bolt out was the real page scroller. Poor old luckycock200 had accidentally put his Dynabolts in the wrong place while installing a clothesline for his sister. There was so much heart-warming community support for him:
Old Bastard: Ahhh, mate. Feel for you.
Gingerpip 230: Same happened to me. It’s a $#%@!
Splinter Jim: R U OK?
Plus, a plethora of solutions – all of which sounded very violent and messy. One thing was clear – the nature, indeed the whole point of the Dynabolt was its robust permanence. It wasn’t designed to be removed. More on this later.
At the end of the day, Smash, CT and Josh signed off with a cold beer and came over to the camp site. I served up the curries and we sat around the fire, eating, drinking, reminiscing. CT told some funny stories about his family, his daughter in particular who was a real pistol – adorable, but stubborn, wild and crazy – like her mother. No one chatted about the shed, and when I tried to steer the conversation toward what was planned for the next day I was shut down. Boring as.
I’d made up a sleeping area for CT in the back of the kitchen tent: a silky oak single bed, an upturned milk crate for a side table, and a towel placed invitingly on the end of the bed. (Not that there was anywhere for him to bathe.) Apart from the towel, it reminded me of one of my earlier share house bedrooms: minimalist and functional. I went to bed early and left the men drinking red wine and chatting by the fire.
In the morning, I snuck into the kitchen tent to make a cup of tea, trying not to wake up CT who had confided he wasn’t an early riser, contrary to many in the trade. As the gas flame roared to life under our blue kettle, I heard groaning coming from the back of the tent. Then a bit of swearing. Then my name being called. I kept a polite distance and asked CT if he would like a cup of tea. Yeah, he said, and a fucking back brace. Turned out, his six foot plus frame had not fitted very well into the silky oak single bed, charming as it was. He’d barely slept a wink all night and had a blinding hangover from drinking too much red wine. He emerged from the back of the tent looking exactly the same as when he’d arrived except hatless, ruffled, and with only one sock on. His eyes had that red rimmed, glazed look that an excess of wine and staring into a fire for too long creates. Smash was not in good shape either. There was some muted jesting over breakfast about how much they’d drunk and smoked; someone said, ‘Spose we’d better get into it’ and no one moved. I offered bacon and eggs for breakfast and CT groaned, rubbed his stomach and said maybe when his guts settled down.
Josh arrived, and while CT was up the hill calling his wife, we had a chat about the progress so far. Josh was concerned about the portals not being square and felt it would lead to trouble down the track, make everything so much harder. He didn’t actually come right out and say it, but it was clear, he thought CT was a bit of a dud in the building department. Couldn’t fault him for entertainment, but his attention to detail was a worry. I immediately began fretting about how much more damage he could do that day, and whether we’d just made our third biggest mistake.
Seconds later, CT came roaring down the track and stopped in a cloud of orange dust. His missus had gone into labour and had been trying to reach him all night. She was royally pissed. I tried to look disappointed, but really, it was a gift. CT however, had no intention of letting us down.
Not to worry, he said. He’d go back, pick up his daughter and bring her down to the block. That way he could keep working and get the job done. ‘You love kids, don’t you?’ he asked me, in a way that made it impossible for me to say, ‘No. Not all kids. Some of them are really annoying’, in case he thought I was referencing his own. (And hadn’t he just spent the previous evening telling tale after tale about how adorably ill-behaved she was?) I was also a little shocked that he would leave his missus straight after the birth, but he guaranteed this was not a problem. It was all very weird; we were so keen to get the shed up, we nearly agreed to his plan. I’m glad we pushed him into going back to be by his wife’s side however, because as soon as we started working on the shed again, it became clear that one of the portals had been dyna-bolted in the wrong way around, cowboy style.
This was the point where we discovered how hard it is to get a Dynabolt out of concrete, let alone eight of them. I felt like going up the hill and joining the Whirlpool forum, to get some sympathy from Splinter Jim.
Hey, luckycock200, you won’t believe what happened…
As it was, we lost a whole day of work, but Josh came up with a plan to unbolt the portal, lift it with his excavator, carefully spin it around 180 degrees then place it back down on the slab, the right way around. Genius. Once again, I wish we had a photo, but we were all too busy, hands on deck, keeping the portal steady so it wouldn’t sway or warp.
It took another whole day to line up all the portals – turned out, it was pretty important to get that first one square. The jury is still out on how important getting the concrete dust out of the Dynabolt hole is though.
(For those of you who don’t know, a Dynabolt is an anchor bolt that is used to connect structural elements, like steel portals to concrete. They are more effective than ordinary bolts as they have a sleeve that expands during installation making them extra strong - and very hard to remove.)
