Drain Cover

Round the back of the house, one of the downpipes from the roof goes into a crude hole in the path.

 As well as looking untidy, the hole collects leaves during autumn, and other rubbish during other seasons. A cover was requested to stop this happening.
At first I thought of using some metal from an old stove that we had lying about (I'd noticed it wasn't rusting, even after years outside) but after cutting it into a sheet, decided that it maybe wasn't quite suitable. As we have a larg amount of slate left over from various jobs, I gave that a try instead.

The slate tile cut quite well using a diamond tile saw, following various lines was pretty easy:

The slate is now cut into two parts, with a cutout for the downpipe:

To drill some holes for fixing to some wooden battens, I used a masonry drill, followed by a larger twist drill for countersinking (This drill is probably pretty blunt now).

Some batten cut to size provides a frame for the slate to lie on, it also holds the two parts together when placed round the downpipe:

And the final cover:

We'll see in the autumn how well it does its job. It looks neater anyway.