I didn’t say it would be pretty

And neither did I say it would be precision engineering (sorry Victor 🙂 ). I’m talking about the repair I had in mind for the ridge piece of the damaged ‘tonnelle’ that I want to repair and, hopefully, bring back into use. To start off with it looked as shown in the image below (this is actually the ridge piece from the ‘tonnelle’ that was destroyed by the wind in 2021 but the damage was identical, funny that).

I planned on using narrow strips of thin metal for the repair and found exactly what I wanted at Leroy Merlin in the form of a small sheet of 0.8mm thick galvanised steel for only 4.95€. All that I then needed to do was cut the strips and use them to re-join the broken pieces to the ridge-piece proper using pop rivets. Here’s how it came out.

The end result seems to be surprisingly strong and rigid but the proof will be tomorrow when I finally set about reassembling the ‘tonnelle’. All I now have to do is run a file over the repairs to remove the sharp edges and corners and give them a flash over with matte black paint. Like I say, it still won’t be pretty but if it works, that’ll do me 😉