Day 51 Maralal June 28, 2011

Greetings

Well today we started out on Kenya time.  Our supplies were supposed to be here early this morning and early turned out to be around eleven am.  The truck arrived and it was supposed to have eighteen twenty foot sections of pipe but the count was only four.  We were supposed to have one hundred forty four elbows and seventy two tees.  The order was reversed and we accepted the seventy two tees and seventy two elbows.  The rest of the elbows and the balance of the pipe should be here tomorrow.  The wood planks should also be done tomorrow and delivered on Thursday.  We did run into a problem with the flanges and it now looks like we are going to weld a coupling to a plate and drill four holes in it to make our own flange. 

We did have a few pieces of pipe and we started to make pieces so we could make a prototype desk of what we are looking to build.  We then ran into another minor problem that took a few hours to resolve.  The die we were using to thread the pipe was defective and it took a couple of hours to figure out how to tighten the clamps so we could manually thread the pipe.  After we got everything working we made enough pieces to make our prototype.  I am a little worried about it.  The desk frame looks so small and I am not sure if it has enough support.  I might change the design a little to give it some out riggers so it doesn’t tip over.  It might be fine but you never know and it might be better to overkill it then have it tip over with a bunch of kids on it.

Tomorrow we will continue to build the frames for the desks.  We have a boat load of cutting and threading to do.  For some reason I am really tired today and I not sure if I over did it.  I was given a helper today and I worked him like a dog.  So I am not sure why I am beat.  I know he was ready to end the day after a couple of hours of manually threading small pieces of pipe.

  

Take care and God bless

Dave