Summer school update – Construction of Shambala’s structure has started

Emma Donnelly’s blog.

It’s now half way through the summer school, and day one of building the two structures. Our team is building a festival structure for Shambala at the end of the month. We need to have this complete by Saturday, so it can be deconstructed on Sunday, loaded into the van on Monday and taken to the festival. There are about ten of us in the team, plus two tutors… but only two of us from this group are heading to the festival to re-erect it. Should be fun!

Day 1 has been great, the two teams naturally formed, the jig was set up, and the first ‘spine’ was complete. Essentially the structure is three timber frame petals of heights 3.5m, 4.2m and 5.5m. We started with the middle sized petal. And that was pretty big! I can’t wait to see the whole thing!

 

Ollie Goddard’s blog

After hitting many ‘snooze’ buttons, I managed to drag my body past the sand trails and smoke-filled cloths from last nights beach party into the high pressure, solar thermal showers for a morning wake up.  Then with steel top-caps on, I gathered some tools and trekked across the valley up into the woods; gathered some shavings and lit a fire for the first brew of the day.

After our team briefing, we set about measuring, sawing, screwing, chiseling and carrying our components; well on our way to erecting the first of three petals for our structure that will house CAT’s exhibition at the Shambala festival; we are now starting to see the rewards of the many hours spent detailing and engineering the structure.  Over the following few days I will be particularly interested in obtaining greater management and carpentry experience for next years APE Project where a few of us will be building a playground for a school in a remote area of Belize.