We did it!

We didn't win but we did achieve what we set out to do.
We built a raft, totally out of recycled materials, completed the course in a respectable 7 minutes and 3 seconds and raised a few quid for a worthy charity,
We also had a bit of fun doing it.

If any of you who came down to see us has any pictures of the race, please get in touch. We'd love to see them and possibly copy a few.


For those of you who were wondering, we used a total of 503 bottles.

I'll be updating this blog with totals once we know how much we've raised.

Where and when.

The race we're entering is the Invensys Rail Raft Race which is part of the Chippenham River Festival.
Racing starts at 11.00am saturday 28th August ( so they'll be fishing us out of the water by 11.05!!! )
The festival itself is open 10.00am til 5.00pm on saturday 28th and sunday 29th August.
Full details can be found here:
www.chippenhamriverfestival.co.uk

Please sponsor us

With only 2 days to go, no more to do to the raft. Our focus turns to raising as much money as possible for the North Wilts NAS.
As the father of an autistic son myself,  I know what an important job they do, a job which relies on charity donations.
Please, if we approach you, give what you can and seriously consider ticking that gift aid box..it really can make a big difference.
If you're coming down to the river festival, come and find us and make a donation there.
Of course, there is also the donate button at the top right corner of this blog where you can make a donation from your paypal account or even your credit/debit card.

The countdown begins

Only 6 days to go. Just finishing touches to do on the raft, no more chances to test it.
The next time the wombles all get together is going to be on saturday at the race.

 It's now a big push for sponsorship, so if you know any of the wombles, expect to get pounced on!!
 If you don't know us or live too far away to get to a sponsor form, please consider hitting that donate button on this page.

The shovels have to go.

Today we had our second float test, it was also our last before the race next saturday.
It was also the only time since we decided to do this that we have managed to get all four wombles together in one place at the same time!!
Up to this point we've been planning to use shovels as paddles, but this morning's outing has changed our minds.
The shovels are fine for gentle paddling around the pond, but prove to be a bit heavy and bulky for prolonged use. (they might also be deemed as dangerous by the race officials ...a swinging shovel can do a lot of damage.)

A friend has lent us a couple of dingy paddles so we've got a week to find 2 more.

drum roll........IT FLOATS!!!!!!!!

Yesterday I strapped the two pontoons to the top of my van, threw loads of scrap timber and extra bottles in the back and went off to meet my fellow wombles down at the pond.

Steve was the first to meet me down there and we soon had the raft assembled along with some improvised seating of celotex slabs (thanks to my outhouse roof coming down the other week) and decided to give it a quick float while we waited for the others to turn up.

It worked!!!  We had a little paddle around the pond and Steve even did a little dance to see how stable it was.
But...we were still two wombles short.
Soon Laurence turned up,  but unfortunately Paul couldn't make it. We needed to see if it would take the weight of 4 wombles!! We soon solved the problem by roping in offspring, Paul was replaced by 3 kids and a dog!!!

With all the extra weight we did get a little lower in the water so added a few more bottles to the bottom just to be on the safe side.
All in all, a very productive morning....and loads of fun too!!!

A most important bucket

Our raft has been slowly taking shape over the last few weeks. Now with a pair of 10 foot pontoons stuck in my back garden, I've been lacing up the bottoms with baling twine...lots and lots of it.
None of which would be possible without a big bucket of twine kindly donated by Laurence.

Miles and miles of twine, threaded through (almost) carefully drilled hole, through aluminium tubes and tied up with the bestest granny knots I could manage (I never was a boy scout). eventually forming a tight net pulling the sides in tight against the bottles and supporting the middles of the lozenges.

The very nice people on Freegle

I mentioned earlier in this blog about putting an appeal on freegle, well, as about 90% of our materials have come from there, I thought it would be nice to put a freegle logo on the raft as a kind of thank you.
I contacted the organisers for permission to use their logo. They not only gave us permission, one of them, a lovely chap called Tom, made up some laminated signs and sent them to us.
 (Thanks Tom, they're brilliant!!)

 

For those of you who don't know about freegle, rather than try to explain, I'll point you in the direction of their main website  www.ilovefreegle.org  which explains very nicely and also helps you find a freegle group in your area.

Extending the pontoons

Up to now, we’ve only had a couple of  7 ft pontoons because of lack of material and were originally planning to stick 4 stubby bits on each end with a slight upward kick to give us a bit of a ‘shape’ to our craft. 
After lots of  consideration and offering bottles and scrap wood up to the ends of what we've already built, we decided it was too much messing about and would just add an extra 3 ft section to the end of each one.

We turned what bottles we had left into lozenges and made our 2 extra sections exactly the same way as the larger sections.

Putting all this together has now given us the basics of our two ten foot long pontoons.

It's starting to take shape!! (well, at least it's the right length now)

How we gonna hold all these together?

The plan was to hold the lozenges together between 10ft long sides as 10ft is the maximum length allowed in the raft race rules.
Unfortunately, the longest scrap ply we had for the sides of the pontoons was only a couple of inches shy of  7 feet long, so we made a start with what we had (always a problem when you’re trying to build out of scrap…especially when you havn’t actually got all your materials yet!!)

We cut our longest bits of plywood down to 200mm wide strips (to allow for 2 rows of bottles)  and marked the all important holes for the bottle caps to go through.  Then using what seemed to be my bluntest 32mm drill we drilled all the holes.
Then simply putting the ends of the lozenges through one of the sides and quite literally ‘thumping’ the other side on we had the basics of our pontoon. We held it together with some offcuts of batten and repeated the whole thing again.

THE LOZENGE....the basic building block of our craft

Last night, once the kids had gone to bed, I set myself up on my patio, armed with all the bottles we’ve collected so far, my wife’s kitchen scissors, my mp3 player and a bottle or two of beer.

The idea is to turn the bottles into lozenges (for want of a better name) using 2 complete bottles base to base with another (usually one of the crunched or capless ones) cut up as a sleeve to hold them together. Giving us a cap at each end for fixing.

It was gone midnight by the time I dragged a tarpaulin over what I’d done and went to bed.
This is what greeted Paul (one of my fellow wombles) in the morning when he came round.

The bottles in the picture are laid out ‘roughly’ as we want them, the piles are 10 feet long which is the maximum allowed length.
As you can see, we still need a few more bottles for the far pontoon.

'Gift Aid' it

As I said before, we're not just doing this for fun, we're asking you dear readers to sponsor us too.
Because we're fundraising for the NAS we can use their official sponsor forms...and they have gift aid.
This is brilliant!!  it means that we can get an extra 28p from the government for every £1 donated.
Provided the sponsor is a british tax payer, fills in their details and most importantly ticks the 'gift aid' box on the sponsor form.
Please, when you see the sponsor forms, think about ticking that box.  It costs you nothing but can make a big difference to our charity.

Thank you.

Bottles....bottles....and MORE bottles

We've decided to build our raft out of 2L fizzy pop bottles. Mad?   Probably, yes!!!

There is a reasoning behind it, because we're wombles, we want to use as much recycled material as possible.
And, because there are other teams out there building rafts, I reckon there won't be a spare 5 gallon drum left in the whole of Chippenham!!!

How many 2 litre bottles get dropped off at the recycling centre every day?...all we have to do is intercept them before they get there.
So....the appeal went out on Freegle.  and the bottles started coming in by the bin bag full!!!

A little about us and what we're all about...

The Westlea Wombles are 4 friends who work together in the Planned Maintenance department of Westlea Housing association.
We wanted to raise funds for the newly formed North Wiltshire branch of the National Autistic Society (formerly the North Wilts ASD Support Group) and thought entering the Chippenham River Festival Raft Race would be a fun way to do it.
This will be a diary of our journey....