I wish pictures did justice to how big of a hole we had to make.
In the light of a fresh day, it looked to me like that strip of very hard blue basalt was just going to be too high to grade the rest of this strip out and get proper drainage.
So while I serviced the machines that desperately needed fuel and grease after the previous 12 hour workday, Denise set up the laser to check elevations.
Sure enough, that strip of hard rock was 4 inches above finish floor of the slab. Plus, it was misery trying to drive over with the skid steer to remove dirt. There was really no option left but to bring out bigger tools.
First thing I did was expose the hard strip by removing all the soft rock and dirt around it at the end of it. It looked like this.
Then it was time for the bigger tool. In this case, a hammer. A really big really expensive hammer.
The hammer cost over 10 grand new. It’s one of those tools you hate to have to have, and hate to put on the machine, but when you need it, you need it. First, we had to change out the post driver bit that I had in the hammer from a previous job and put the breaker point in. To give idea of how big the hammer breaker point is here I am servicing it.
After getting the bit, cleaned up, lubed up, and put in the hammer breaker-it was hammer time!
( cue rap music, crazy baggy pants, and erratic dance moves ut-oh, ut-oh!😄)
Breaking rock is far more difficult than breaking concrete. A lot of the impact energy is either just transferred into the surrounding dirt, or the rock is so big and solid it can be difficult to get a fracture started.
Fortunately, the patch of basalt was pretty small and the hammer made fairly short work of it-reducing the lump of solid rock into manageable sized bits.
The rock was pretty once it was all broken up.
It would make a pretty-but expensive-wall covering or fireplace fascia.
Once that was all broken up, it was time to scoop it out and get back to exposing the foundation of the building so that repairs could be affected there.
Here’s what I spent a day and a half doing with the excavator. Extremely close proximity to the Steel Building.
To say it was stressful is an understatement. Fortunately, we pulled it off and after 2 1/2 days with two machines working right next to the building managed to never touch the building even once. Which is good, because even a little love tap would mean extreme damage to the steel siding.
Other than the obvious drainage and peril to the building, there were other reasons all this dirt had to be cleared away so carefully. Again, I’m not going to mention much about that for reasons I’d rather not get into, but here is a picture of one of the issues. Someone decided to quit using form boards and pour the concrete back into the native rock during the concrete process. Again, if you’ve ever put up a Steel building, the problem with this decision should be immediately obvious to you.
Here’s a couple of pictures of me breaking up the rock, and Denise shuttling the material out with the skiddy.
Now, I should say here that Denise was not merely just removing material with the skid steer and just randomly putting it somewhere else. During all of her removal, she was accomplishing multiple other tasks with the material. One-she was loading a dump trailer for the camp personnel who were hauling the dirt to other areas in the camp to affect road and drainage repairs. Two- some of the material was stockpiled for the camp staff to use for maintenance and road repairs at a later date. And three-she was busy working all around this Steel Building filling in holes, building approaches and driveways, and basically fixing the dirt work that never got done when the slab and building were finished. We are a little short on pictures here as it was crunch time, but here is one picture of her finished work building an approach to the south side of the building.
This approach was critical, as it is pedestrian access to the south end of the building.
Most of the pictures that we have showed you were of the north side of the building. But it turns out the east side of the building had all the same issues. Once again, as it was crunch time, and they were a lot of machines and equipment moving around so we didn’t get many pictures, but here are a few of us tuning up and finishing The east side.
The northside, where the bulk of the issues and work were, ended up being an 8 foot deep hole when we were done. Sloping it back ended up being quite the challenge due to limited reach of the machine and the terrain already being sloped into the cut. It’s fun when you’re digging on a slope and gravity and the bucket both want to pull you over the edge. 😬
Additionally, in the corner, the material was nothing but large head size and bigger rocks that kept wanting to roll down into the building, forcing us to slope it off significantly differently in order to avoid having them roll into the building with future erosion.
This is what the final product looked like. The camp staff are going to build gabions to line the bottom foot or so of the cut as a decorative and erosion preventative measure.
It didn’t come out perfect, but it came out good, and gives access to the building for maintenance and gives them drainage control that they didn’t have before.
Considering that neither Denise nor I are “ operators”, I feel like we accomplished a lot, with acceptable results, in a time frame that was pretty impressive.
By my rough measurements and an online calculator, I estimate that in the end, we moved somewhere north of 150 cubic yards of material.
And every yard of that material went through the excavator bucket first. Assuming heaping bucket fulls, that means somewhere in the neighborhood of 900 bucket fulls of material. That’s a lot of scoops!
By 2 PM on Saturday, we have the job finished enough to shut it all down, pack up our stuff, and head home for some much-needed rest. After a long drive down the winding mountain road, and lots of traffic over the I 40 for the weekend, we finally arrived home at some point after 5 PM. It had been a pretty long week and it was good to be home!
