E-mail received from DriveAway turntable customer, Mr Don Openshaw - Tuesday 29th October 2002

Hello Peter,
 
Yes my British Turntable "turntable" has been successfully installed in Tenerife and is proving to be one of the best investments that I have made in many years.
 
The driveway into my garage has, not-only a nasty slope, but a bit of a dogs-leg too. This makes, the reversing-out of my Ferrari into a quite busy road pretty scary stuff....and has cost me a few bob in having a couple of front fender scuffs smoothed-out and sprayed.
 
The result of having a driveway like this is to always take the easy optoin and to use the second car, which in my case is a considerably narrower and a little shorter. This all meant....one very under-utilised Modena 360, collecting dust rather than kilometers.
 
Because the slope of my drive continues into the garage for 5 metres, and because I have rather a large heating-unit for my swimming pool just inside the garage door....and...because I had to leave sufficient room ahead of the turntable to park either the Ferrari or my second car...the worst part of the whole installation was deciding the position for the central bearing of the turntable, to ensure that I would ALSO miss the side walls of the garage which are only Ferrari length + 20 cm apart.
 
Finally, the answer was to excavate-out a semi-circle of garage floor......about 30cm wider than the turntable...with an initial drop of 15cm, reducing to zero when it met the (already) flat part of the floor.
 
As the turntable stands at a height of 7cm, it was necessary for me to add a concrete slope around the semi-circle to "take up" the extra 8cm that had been cut out of the slope. This slope starts-off at a depth of 8cm and reduces as it nears the centre-line of the turntable.
 
I had the (half) concrete base and the sloping concrete bits done by my local builder, but assembled and installed the turntable completely alone.
 
Breaking up the tiled floor and laying the concrete took my builder about 1 day. My installation time was about two full days....but considering that this included many Tenerifian breaks for swims, beers, chats etc...and considering that I shall be celebrating my 70th. this week....I don't reckon that two days was too bad !!
 
The end result...you can see from the enclosed pics.
 
The Ferrari now gets far more airings than ever before, and after only two years, the mileage has rocketed- up to about 7,000km!!!
 
I confirm that the turntable is extremely easy to self-instal...and also, that it is extremely easy to rotate when loaded, even for my nine stone lady...(nb. when the turntable "is loaded"...NOT..when my lady "is loaded".)
 
Please let me know if you would care for any further details...and please give my regards and thanks to Phil Childs.
 
Best Regards
 

Don Openshaw, Tenerife

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