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jackhammering after a two year hiatus
Sunday, September 25 2016
I had to take the dogs on their morning walk this morning. The Whistle Tracker that Neville was wearing indicated he had gone into the Valley of the Beasts and then remained there for hours. Hes was still there when the battery of his device died, and his position became something of a mystery. In my mind, Neville has become a bit accident-prone, so I began wondering if the poor guy got stuck in, I don't know, a leghold trap. So I set off down the Stick Trail towards Neville's last known position. I soon found him walking slowly homeward and he was fine.
I took advantage of the ongoing drought to fire up my jackhammer for the first time in about two years, using it to continue excavating the greenhouse's sub-basement, something I'd stopped working on in 2014 when we bought our first rental house. I'd run a small pump to remove most of the several inches of water that had still been present, and it hadn't been quick to fill back in. Still, there wasn't much water-free surface to attack. Though the jackhammer is electric-powered, it is supposedly double-insulated, and I wore rubber boots as I operated it so as not to fully ground myself. I didn't work for much more than an hour, but I nevertheless was able to excavate about 25 gallons of rock (most of it bluestone). The hardest part of the work is hoisting the bucket of rocks up using the block & tackle. The mechanical advantage reduces the weight to 25% of what it would otherwise be, so the effort of pulling it up shouldn't be that much. But the rope tends to want to twist, and the resulting friction can be hard to overcome.
I dumped the removed rock at a new rock disposal site about ten feet north of the northeast corner of the greenhouse, near a place where I disposed of drywall and other things removed from the main house last year when I did the basement flooring and wall resurfacing project.
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