It’s been over two months since I’ve updated this thread-and indeed, I haven’t even been on RDP in all that time.
To say we’ve had an extra lot going on the last several months would be a serious understatement.
Without getting into details, let’s just say that our work and personal lives have been very challenging and have consumed all our time and then some for the last several months.
Things are still hectic, we survived some uncomfortable bumps in the road, and we feel like we’ve come out the other side in reasonably good shape.
I wish I had time to share with you all the ups and downs, or at least show you some of our updated projects-but I don’t right now.
We did get our work trailer put back together enough to get it back out in the field, and the upgraded air conditioning has been great.
Now, I’m gonna skip over the last couple months and jump to last Monday. We finally were able to commence work on a large project that we have been waiting to start for like a year now. Without getting into details-this job has had a bunch of start up issues way beyond our control that have prevented us from starting, so it’s with great relief, and a lot of stress, that we are finally here and doing our thing.
We got a few cool trees to park next to, so that’s nice.
First on our to-do list was to lay out the array area to prepare for installation of the ground mount arrays.
I used the dozer blade on the excavator to grub off the site as it was a nightmare of gopher holes and nasty tumbleweeds.
Then we laid out our array structure and post locations. We had all that, plus getting camp set up and the job site organized by the end of day one. 💪
Day two had us installing these special ground screws that we brought in for the odd soil type encountered here.
As usual, Denise is on the ground directing me what to do with the excavator as we drive the screws. It’s her job to make sure each screw is properly located and stays plumb as I drive it in.
We had a lot of screws to install. 68 of them to be precise.🙄
We had one screw where we had a mishap and we destroyed the screw, the drive pin, and damaged the drive adapter a little. Oops!😄😄😬😬
It was a long day where we each logged about 15 hours, but we managed to get all but 8 of the 68 anchors installed.
The next morning well before sunup we were back at it installing the remaining ground screws.
Once that was done, we checked our layout one last time to make sure everything was installed correctly and in the right place, performed uplift tests on random ground screws to insure they would hold, then we rolled up shop and headed home for some much needed rest. In four days we had each logged almost 60 hours, but we had a successful first week and even managed to get ahead of our proposed schedule.