The waterline was the last big project before we moved into the house. Our friend Jim Woodring came in again to help us. We rented a Ditch Witch and started to dig the 2800 feet of ditch that we needed to bring the line from the trailer on the paved road to the house. We hadn't gone more than about 3 feet when it stalled and refused to start. Two days later, after Jim and I worked on it and a repair crew from the rental place replaced some parts we were under way again. Some areas were fairly smooth sailing but...
when we had to cross the little stream that comes from our pond we bogged down and had to use the tractor to climb back out. The most annoying thing however, was that the chain that does the actual digging kept breaking. The first time it took us more than an hour to repair. By the last (fifteenth) time we could do it in about 10 minutes. We each knew what we needed to do and each of us took care of our part; link, chain, bar, grease gun, allen key, pliers, etc..
The machine didn't take
care of all the digging. There was
still
plenty of manual labor when we were near things that we wanted to avoid
damaging, like the house siding, phone lines, power pole, and the water
line to the trailer. At one place we had to merge the ditch
for
the
underground electrical service with the water line ditch.
Since
there
was a portion where the machine would be in the first ditch in order to
dig the second that stretch had to be done by hand as well.
It
happens
that it was also where the line went under our driveway so the soil,
heavy
clay, was very well compacted. That was a real test
of our
endurance.
For the next part of the job we worked out a rig on the tractor to
unspool the pipe along the ditch that really helped with
that.
The
individual rolls of pipe weighed about 200 pounds and were awkward as
well.
We had to make sure the joints were secure so that when we pressurized the line we wouldn't have any leaks. Nancy and Jim are working on the conduit that will carry the electrical service to the house. Of course we needed a string through that line to pull the rope that would be used to pull the wire. We were concerned that the string would break or be glued down and we would need to fish another line through the completed pipe. We came up with several imaginative solutions but fortunately none were needed.
Unfortunately because of the delays caused by the Ditch Witch we weren't able to get the water and electric hooked up while Jim was here so he will have to wait to try out the hot tub.
Go to our Science Fun pageE-mail Nancy and
Alan