Polytunnel Part 6 - The Base Rails

I've been taking every opportunity I can to carry on with the polytunnel build, and by some miracle, whenever I have recently had some spare time, the weather has also been onside too.  Today's effort took a little longer that I anticipated, but it was a good morning's work.  Over the last 24 hours, there has been a lot of rain come down, so I was expecting things to be quite muddy.  Fortunately most of the digging has now been done, so though the ground is quite saturated, it's not too bad.

All the base rail timber components are bundled together, so it's easy to identify what I needed.  And obviously, the more ironmongery is used, the less there is to search through to find what is needed next.  The instructions say that the place to start is along the higher edge if your tunnel is being built on a slope where the slope is running across the width of the tunnel.  Though ours is on a slope, it slopes more back to front rather across the width.

Working along the longer edges first, I fitted the corner brackets first and then used the longer timber pieces along the length of the frame.

The rail for the long side of the tunnel needs two pieces of timber joining together with a couple of nail plates.  I hadn't realised, but when putting the first rail in place, the join was right next to a hoop.  Less than ideal given that you need to drill through the join and nail plate to fit the U bolt and clamp into place.  Fortunately, I managed to get away with it when I initially thought it would have been a show stopper and my first proper mistake of the build.

With the first long end of the rail fitted into place, the next step was to fit the short rail between the corner of the tunnel frame, and the side of the door frame.  To make sure the timber rail doesn't sit out proud of the door frame, it's attached on the inside of the corner instead of the outside of the frame and then screwed into the door frame with a long screw and reinforced with nail plates.

It took a bit longer that I expected to get this far.  Each step of the process, I referred back to the paper instructions and the instruction video several times, just to make sure that it was also going according to plan.  But once I knew what I was doing, I picked up the pace a bit more and the rest of the rail install went well.

Finally, all the base rail timbers were fitted all the way around the frame.  There are two cuts to make at the front of the tunnel, but I will be leaving that for the next stint of work.  That's the main part of the structure now complete.  The only timber left in the garage at home are all the lengths of batten.

The next stage of the build to be covered in part 7 of this mini series will be preparing for the cover to be fitted.  This will involve fitting batten around the door frames and around the base rails ready to pinch in the polythene cover when that is fitted.  We're getting close now, but alas, things are going to go on pause for the next week or so but I hope to be back on it again just after the new year break, as long as the weather continues to play ball of course!  Until next time, Cheers!