With the 5 pontoons completed and in the water, the next step was to assemble the frame to hold them together. The only difficulty for us here is the lack of a crane. If we had a crane of some sort, we might have built the floor frame on land and hoisted it onto the water and bolted all of the pontoons together at once. 

Instead, we decided to assemble the frame on the pontoons so that each steel beam would be light enough to carry into place by human labor (without a crane).

The team mostly handled this without me this week as I was quite busy with work. They began by taking two light temporary steel beams and C-clamping the pontoons into the right configuration with this temporary jig:

Then they welded pontoon mounting brackets onto two heavy support beams, one for each side of the row of pontoons:

After mounting these beams, they could weld the cross beams to make a solid frame. Here is a picture of them painting the steel after the core structural frame was completed:

Now they are beginning to weld on these lighter C-beams to support the floor boards:

And just for +thainl42 I took a picture of the welding safety masks they use:

I wasn’t around today when they were doing the welding, but I’m hopeful that since they went through the effort of bringing the masks from the storage shed that they might have actually used them when they were welding. 😉

Promoting a safe work site isn’t always easy, but it is always important.