Work Projects Week 1
There's nothing like the sound of an engine that won't start when you have about 50 wheelbarrows full of concrete to mix and move. This is a photo of Lassa and a couple of the guys from the base looking into the dilemma. Lassa oversees the operations at the base and helped us get the supplies ordered for us.

Nope, this baby never started. So the next thing we decided to do was to mix all the concrete by hand. Yep, that's the manly way of doing it...

On the left is Juanca, who helped us most of the week. On the right is Guerby who seems to have a fan watching over things.
Meanwhile, dapper Andrew starts off the day on the left with a sledge hammer, but within an hour shown on the right you can see that reality of the humidity has made him a little more casual.

By the second day, Dave inspects our diversion route for traffic up the hill past our concrete work while Andrew and I get busy on the job.

Here we're getting the next section ready for the forms.

The forms get done and then we pour the concrete. Andrew, Dave and I rotate the job of wheeling down the concrete and floating it out.

Below, our work complete. In a few days it will be strong enough to drive on.

Here on the right, Dave announces that he will be making some changes to an old table found outside the tool shed. What he has in mind is to turn it into a table-saw so that he can create some kitchen cabinets for Alex and Jennifer's home.

I was fascinated, so I took a bunch of pictures of the operation. Andrew assisted in the transformation process.

In the next several stills, you can see how an old table is transformed into a tablesaw complete with guide fence.

Attaching the hand-held circular saw was the tricky part. Dave used some shims to get the blade to stand completely vertical and not move.

After attaching the circular saw (above and right), Dave adds marks for the guide fence and demonstrates how it all works (below and below right).

After this, it was time to use it to cut the pieces of the cabinets. Andrew took right to the new tool and began cutting pieces for the shelf unit (stills below).