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second pour
Hurrah! We poured the walls today! And what a job it was. Stan
tracked down a concrete pumper. The fellow, Tim, only had it since
April a year ago, so not many people knew about it. It's a pretty
clever thing. It's a big motor mounted on a trailer with a hopper at
the back. The motor drives a hydraulic pump, which drives two
pistons. Inside the hopper is a valve that's connected to the hose.
The open cylinder sucks in the concrete while the closed cylinder
pushes it down the house. So you have a pretty severe pulsing effect.
First time it pumped concrete out the end, it whipped around a foot
and nearly threw Stan off the scaffolding. He was, ahem, surprised.
But once we learned how to deal with the spitting snake, we got the
walls filled up in short order. No blowouts, but one edge close to
one window bulged a bit. While we switched from one concrete truck to
another, the concrete started to set up inside the hose. Made for a
bit of a nervous moment.
Boy, did those forms hold. You could see them bulge when we put a
particularly tall lift into them. One was five or six feet tall for
sure. And Tim was hopping up the bracing, and jumping and leaning on
the forms. Good *thing* we had that extra bracing.
Stan spent some of the time in the morning working on the electric
entrance. He's all set for the inspector, who's supposed to come
Monday. Ni-Mo seems to be all set, although I'm sure they're going to
want the end next to the pole buried before they'll energize it. I
can do that over the weekend.
Jeff and Brent cleaned up inside the forms. They had a lot of scraps
of styrofoam left over.
Oh, and by the way, we borrowed $140,000 today.
-russ