The next project is the bathroom, so a shower and toilet need to be built/installed.  I thought I'd start with the shower base.

Actually, it is not going to be a normal shower, where the water only passes over your body once, it's going to be a recirculating shower, a bit like a vertical bath! The pump sucks the water from the shower base, filters it, and sprays it out in an endless loop.  This means you can have a 10 minute shower with only 5 or 10 litres of water, maybe with a top up of hot water every so often. (Note that you start every new shower with fresh water - some people though water was being re-used between showers!)

The base is made from 2.0mm aluminium sheet, bent up and TIG welded into a bath style container. Here it is being 'leak tested' with 10 litres of water, to see if my welds are actually waterproof. After 2 or 3 hours, no leaks at all, so that was good.

The top is made of redgum wood that I found in my wood-heap.  It started off as an length of roofing timber from an old shed on the farm. I cut it down to 40 x 15mm strips, just rough cut off the blade, using a Triton Workbench.

Unfortunately the beams were probably 50 or 60 years old, so a lot of them were not all that structural and broke apart with a modest amount of pressure applied.  A pretty high attrition rate!

I TIG welded a lip onto the top edge to support the cross beams.

The slats will be attached to these upside down aluminium "T" pieces by rivets. The drain hole will host a push-button style plug, where you push to close it and push again to open it. There is no rubber plug needed.

The rough sawn timber is naturally anti-slip, and I coated it with some Tung Oil that soaks in to protect the wood, but it doesn't make it slippery like varnish. Remarkable colour change when the oil is applied!

This is the finished unit, ready to be installed into the bathroom. There is almost zero flex in the top - the inverted aluminium 'T's are very resistant to deflection.  Four bolts at the corners clamp the top to the base, using some stainless bolts and RivNuts.

 

BTW - The hole in the top is so you can reach through and push the drain plug to empty the water out.