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kastein posted:I don't particularly care as long as I've got somewhere to crap, shower, cook, and sleep ...he said, on page 42 of the second thread detailing his 9-year-long gut and rebuild of the place where he craps, showers, cooks, and sleeps.
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Apr 30, 2019 23:40
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Well. I've spent a lot of time cleaning up the yard and whatnot but no pics worth posting. Also finally got the asbestos remediation crew out for a quote. *Gulp* 22 thousand dollars. I had a gut feeling it was gonna cost me 15-20 but that was still a punch in the nuts. Samples are off to the lab for testing and we're assuming they're gonna come back positive, at which point they start removing the siding, pipe insulation, boiler, and any contaminated things in the basement. Given it's a dirt floor under pipe insulation and MAG that's in rough shape (why I've been staying out of the basement whenever possible...) that includes scraping the top 6 inches of soil and HEPA vaccing every surface. I'm pretty ok with that since I wanted to pour a slab down there anyways. Still, loving ow. I guess I was willing to pay 55 for this place with the asbestos in 2010, paying 60 without it isn't that bad...  The building inspector is also very unhappy with the condition of the front porch. Given its extremely dilapidated condition (it's actually falling down at one corner, I didn't care since I planned on tearing it off and starting fresh anyways) I completely agree, I'm just going to have to tackle it as soon as the asbestos siding is gone instead of waiting another few months.
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May 16, 2019 02:40
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Just grab a $30 respirator and some kitchen trash bags from Walmart, what could go wrong? nobody actually do this
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May 16, 2019 02:57
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Coasterphreak posted:nobody actually do this That's right. You need a hose to spray it down first. Then you're golden.
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May 16, 2019 03:04
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Motronic posted:That's right. You need a hose to spray it down first. Then you're golden. Brake cleaner.
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May 16, 2019 03:09
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Are you like best buds with the building inspector at this point? How many times has he been out to your house?
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May 17, 2019 15:07
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The old guy was really cool, he mostly just showed up to see what I was up to and make off color jokes. He retired a while ago though. New guy is less amused, especially by the extremely ragged parts I haven't removed yet, but seems decent.
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May 17, 2019 23:53
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Coasterphreak posted:Just grab a $30 respirator and some kitchen trash bags from Walmart, what could go wrong? Pretty sure the house next door did this. (I moved into a subdivided battleaxe block at the end of a cul-de-sac, over my side fence at the time were the original half-acre blocks that got turned into the next cul-de-sac.)
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May 18, 2019 13:28
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Well I haven't updated this in far too long. I put in a footing for a new support column in the basement. It's sitting on bedrock because that's what I hit after digging a whopping 4 inches.   Then work began on clearing old roofing debris from the porch roof. It was still sitting up there from when I did the main roof years ago simply because I was afraid to walk on it, knowing the porch roof was on its last legs when I bought the place and hadn't gotten any better since then. I've also had far bigger problems to fix than moving roofing debris that was hurting nothing and couldn't even be seen from the street or any windows. But it had to go because it was in the way of the asbestos abatement crew, so here goes... Gross.  Better.  If you do step on it, gravity will do its thing all at once.  It was actually like 3 or 4 truck loads but it all looks the same.  All ready for pickup. One bag of plaster, concrete, windows, and random junk, one bag of plaster and random junk, and another bag of all roofing.  Then to no one's surprise bagster shafted me yet again and this time they decided it was my fault and charged me a trip fee. With their success rate at 50% and them being completely unhelpful on the phone when I called to complain I decided to cut my losses and tell them to get hosed. I had recently found a local waste removal firm that advertises green bag pickup so I gave them a shot. Imgur is being a fuckhat and not accepting my second image dump so it'll have to wait. I think this covers through the end of May or beginning of June though.
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Aug 7, 2019 12:35
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We're all just glad to see that the house hasn't killed you. Also, I'll second the 'gently caress imgur' thoughts.
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Aug 7, 2019 13:44
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It's putting the images in completely loving random order in my albums and making me annoyed enough at its bullshit that I just lose the motivation to even try to post updates. Also it forgot I was going to upload another album from 15 minutes before I posted my last rant sentence until like loving 3pm at which point it took 45 minutes to upload them for no reason. The gently caress??? Oh and it now lists them all as "unknown" instead of showing a file name so I have to play loving librarian to get them in the right order again. House hasn't killed me but it's trying to kill my wallet. Getting rid of the bagsters. The local company turned out to not have the crane truck that WM uses to pick up bagsters and were going to HAND UNLOAD the bags and put it in their truck. I told them that was going to be way too much work and let's wait a weekend or two so I can fix *my* crane truck...   Company owner showed up and thought it was awesome. Good thing, because the drat chinesium chainfall broke partway on the third bag and we had to two-man it. Tip your garbagemen... that is four thousand pounds - about 3.5 yards - of mixed gravel from the flat roof and asphalt shingles from the main roof. I love having a redneck crane. I am not even going to try and sum these up or put them in more than mostly-the-right-order. Asbestos abatement happened early June.               They had to chop up part of the very poorly constructed back deck to get some asbestos cement siding out from under it that the previous owners had broken loose and simply tossed under the deck when they installed it. I had found it when I took that wall down to replace it due to rot and severe structural defects, and simply pushed it further under. They didn't find all of it - it's still coming up out of the soil every time there's a rainstorm - but after having to come back out once to collect a few pounds of fragments they just left me an asbestos bag and as we find more, I collect it into the bag. Eventually when we replace the back deck I will be digging deep on this whole area and sifting the trash and asbestos out of it, once that's done I'll seal the bag up and have them come collect it for disposal. Gaze upon the wonder that is my back deck, and recall I drove a truck full of shingle debris on this years ago and somehow it didn't fall down.          That's all for today I think.
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Aug 7, 2019 23:30
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Your issues with Bagster are the primary reason I refused to use them for my own remodel. I rented a dumpster instead. One of the best $325 I ever spent. Also wtf is going on with your deck joists. Did someone just... randomly cut 90% through some of them? 
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Aug 8, 2019 01:04
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SouthShoreSamurai posted:Your issues with Bagster are the primary reason I refused to use them for my own remodel. I rented a dumpster instead. One of the best $325 I ever spent. Uh how else would you get a jacuzzi in there to impress the females?
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Aug 8, 2019 01:31
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Some of those"joists" are 1x material too, unless I miss my guess. And those fasteners are a shitshow.
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Aug 8, 2019 01:46
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Yes, many of them are 1x6s. And yes, some are cut most of the way through for absolutely no reason. The fasteners are all undersize and/or missing or applied wrong too. Not pictured, how each 4x4 support post is held to the frame with a grand total of THREE 12D NAILS and no bracket.
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Aug 8, 2019 14:05
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Hey at least they made it easy to take apart for you
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Aug 8, 2019 19:08
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Laminator posted:Hey at least they made it easy to take apart for you There is that. If you’re going to do a poo poo job, at least make it easy to remove.
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Aug 8, 2019 19:17
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Realtalk: at which point what the first time and how many times after that have you realized that you should have bought an RV to put on the property and tore the house to the ground as your first and second steps in "rebuilding" it?
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Aug 8, 2019 19:55
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For the longest time I've been thinking kastein and Motronic were the same poster. At least ya'll are both cool people right? 
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Aug 8, 2019 22:41
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He likes Porsches enough to actually pay more than low 4 figures for a car. Definitely not the same person.  Easy to take apart is right. Just wait till you see the front stairs... They practically took themselves apart. But that's a month forward in my images from the next post. And yes. I really wish I had bulldozed the place and built new from scratch. Oh, happy to report that my self installed HVAC works GREAT. I ended up bullshitting with my neighbors son one day and he's an HVAC pro. So he made sure I wasn't doing anything stupid and now the AC and heatpump work quite nicely. I eventually got the system to hold high double digit micron vacuum and not leak a couple hundred psi worth of argon for 24 hours. Worth noting, argon drives a thermistor type micron gauge insane due to the difference in molecular mass, so I ended up doing a vacuum check with air (right after closing the system up), then pressure check, then vacuum check that gave me insane results because argon and air have different molecular mass and thermal conductivity, then flushed the argon out with air and did another vacuum check that read correctly. Having done both vacuum and service pressure testing now, I don't think I'll ever rely on vacuum testing on automotive systems again even though it's all most people do. My initial attempt held vacuum no problem but started leaking wildly at a couple flare fittings as soon as I stuck like 300psi of argon in it. After two attempts I managed to get it to stop leaking and it went from that 4220 micron vacuum reading I was getting to the high double digit micron range and held that with no problem... Though I did have to change the oil in my chinesium vacuum pump to achieve that. The oil in it was from like 2014 and while it worked fine for r134a systems in 400 dollar beater cars, I kinda care about this system a bit more and wanted the best vacuum I could achieve.
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Aug 8, 2019 23:19
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So. The exterior asbestos abatement went on as it looks like it did, until it was all gone. Then they went in the basement and tackled that. About 150 linear feet of pipe insulation and also none of us were too certain if the boiler contained any asbestos. Given that I also had no idea if it worked or not and didn't care because the house only came with 3 radiators (which have since been scrapped), we agreed they should just rip it out and dispose of it as PACM (presumed asbestos containing material.) Look, no asbestos!  No furnace either!    And then I ripped all the pipes out in one evening because drat I've been smashing my skull on them and fearing mesothelioma as dust rained down on me for, oh, a drat decade.    gently caress YOU  This whole time I was fiddle-loving around with SolidWorks trying to remember how to use it so I could put together the drawings for the porch permit. First, the ledger, joists, and beams/band joists...  Then the columns and starting the frieze beams  Then the ceiling joists and rafters along with their ledgers.  I debated reproducing the period-correct rounded corner but ended up deciding it was far more trouble than it was worth, especially since the structure was, uh, not very structural in the original.  Now that the porch is cleared off enough to actually walk on (I used to store building materials on it, and had it intentionally blocked with a stack of lumber) I decided to mark it so no one can sue me if they trespass and fall through it.  Seriously, you'll die if you walk much past the line.  I realized that the cement pad for the old furnace could go, as the new one is a wall mounted unit.  My rotary hammer is easily one of my favorite tools now. Cutting, drilling, and breaking up masonry was simply impossible until I bought this beast and my hammer drill.  Here we go on the corner... 3D modeling is not my specialty and I'm sure I went about this all wrong but hey it made a pretty picture.    I think it's done...  looks all official and poo poo!  Inspector had a few changes to suggest. I had actually used larger lumber than this in my original plan but had cut it down somewhat when he said I didn't need to use anything that big. Turns out code requirement was in the middle.  I called digsafe because I'm legally required to. National Grid did a piss poor job of marking the gas main and told me there was no locate tape and I was on my own. Town DPW's nearest marking for water main was a full 25 feet from the closest point I premarked (in white, as the prophecy foretold) and they told me I was on my own for sewer marking and also any water marking they didn't do. Thanks. So I guess it's time to be an EOD tech / manual pipe locator. Garden trowel it is.   One fine evening I came home and decided it was time for the porch roof to get stripped. Made some decent headway... this roof was what's known as BUR or Built Up Roofing. Essentially, many layers of tarpaper are laid down and nailed down with roofing nails that have a ring of plastic or sheetmetal under the head. Then a thick coating of roofing tar is swabbed onto it and pea gravel is poured over it to protect it from the sun and physical damage. So aside from splitting it into large chunks to carry it, it comes up really quick once you get through it, because there's only a nail every foot or so.  Last time anyone sees this mess.  Whoops that same spot has the other pile of roofing on top of it now.  Next morning I finished shoveling up the loose fragments.  Except the part past that spot because, uh, I aint stepping on it or prying against it.  Cleared area looking the other way from the same spot as the last picture. The eaves were so decomposed I couldn't really pry against them and left them to be Tomorrow Ken's problem.  Then I sat there and mused about what to do next and suddenly the roof decking was gone too. In my defense, I was left unsupervised.  The short side of the porch roof got put to the edge of the sword as well.  This was kinda sketchy. This is the corner I had to smash loose from the frame of the house back in 2015 to replace a 5ft long weight-bearing wall that wasn't. It was more like weight-bearing air. The roof has been dangling since then so not much persuasion was required for it to come apart.  Next up, I demolish the porch roof structure, cause a great disturbance, and almost loving die. At no point was consulting OSHA for safe work practices even remotely considered.
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Aug 9, 2019 00:38
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IN WHICH I ALMOST loving DIE So that far corner I didn't strip the roofing off of? It was massively unstable. Like, it was unsafe in 2010 when I bought this shithole and zero maintenance (because I knew it was getting demolished) and 9 years haven't been kind to it. The roofing was perforated and the squirrels and raccoons had been nesting in it for several years, and eventually all the rafters simply... rotted through. And most of the roof decking. About a 2 foot wide hole was only being held up by about 4 to 6 layers of BUR roofing felt, tar, and gravel. So I went up the ladder and started carefully picking away at it and tossing the roofing debris onto the porch floor below so I wouldn't have to scrape it out of the lawn. Eventually I got all the roofing material removed and started attacking the roof deck planks. They came off without much fuss as well. Now I was uncertain how to proceed because, well, the framing I had remaining was so far gone that basically removing almost anything could risk a collapse. And this entire corner of the roof was supported by a vertical post that was supported by another vertical post with the floor and joists in between... except the floor and joists were also decomposing badly, and the whole thing was only avoiding scissoring away from the house because of a small section of porch railing that was partially nailed to the house still. Essentially, looking at this rotten contraption was risky enough let alone leaning a ladder on it or cutting pieces out. I removed all the rotted in half rafters, knowing that they weren't really holding anything up anyways since only one end of each piece was attached. This gave me An Idea. I'll simply run the ladder from ground up through where the roof used to be and lean it on the wall of the house, then stand on it facing outward and carefully cut the frieze beams and eave structure away in sections only a couple feet long until it's clear! So I cut the first section away from the wall of the house, and again at the corner of the roof. It falls clear and everything goes according to plan. Next up, I have to cut a couple feet from there, roughly straight out from my ladder, and lift that section off the top of the corner support post. So I start cutting. As soon as I cut through, everything goes loving sideways. It turns out the frieze beam wasn't actually attached to the top of the post at all - except by gravity - so it flops sideways and bounces off the outside of the ladder. I drat near have a heart attack but the ladder holds, because it hit on the outside. Then I see the support post start toppling and it collapses onto a tree branch. I gave it a push and it falls... and I look down and everything goes into loving slow motion because I forgot all about the temporary diagonal bracing I'd added to keep the lower corner support post from scissoring outward. This 8ft 4x4 post falls and hits it just right. The bracing holds firm but the 4x4 swivels and bounces... outward on the side behind my drat ladder. Hits the ladder hard and suddenly I'm riding a 16 foot ladder toward a ramshackle porch and a pile of debris, and if the feet don't catch very shortly I'm TRULY hosed because there's a stone retaining wall and then another 4 foot drop and it'll skitter across my neighbors driveway and blast the side of their house. I'm gonna loving die I'm an idiot what the hell was I thinking... ... and then the feet of the ladder caught something and dug into the ground and I didn't actually break anything or fall more than about 6 feet. I'll definitely be more careful in the future, though. The top of that ladder was right under the eaves not 30 seconds before this picture was taken.  You can see the diagonal brace that helpfully redirected the 4x4 post into my ladder in the lower right. At this point I had cut another section of roof structure away and let it fall. I found the best way was to mostly cut the support post (if any) under the section to be removed, carefully pry the rafters most of the way off the wall of the house, then cut through the frieze beam and eaves and let the roof section swing down and fall on the porch floor. It was manageable in roughly 4 foot sections.  Another section down, and done for the night.  The next morning I got an early start and killed the rest of that side of the porch roof...  ... and then the other side too.  This truck is still with me, ten years later. I think it's my longest-running vehicle, though it's rusted out to the point that I barely ever drive it on the road anymore, it still makes an excellent junk hauler to bring large loads of C&D waste up the hill to the dumpster.  [tetris theme intensifies]  Took a break from demolition to get the sewer cleanout open so I could look down the pipe instead of trying to dig it up outside to find where it goes. Except it's not 4 inch NPT, it's not 3 inch NPT, and it's not the old 3.5 inch NPT that was often used for cleanout plugs on cast iron systems.  Whittle the 4 inch test plug I got as an emergency last ditch option down a bit...  ... and it fits.  If anyone has a 3.5" NPT tap that I could borrow so I can clean the threads out, I'd love to pay to borrow it because I'm not paying $450 for the cheapest 3.5" NPT tap I could find anywhere. Time for more porch demolition. Since the roof is gone, the floor's up next. Shovel all the remaining debris off it after clearing it of cut-up chunks of roof structure...   Part of the long side of the floor is gone.  Whole long side is gone now!  Short side next...    I pried the rest of the ledgers off the house and started putting up the new ones. Old? 2x4 untreated, haphazardly nailed into the sill every 2ish feet. New? 2x8 pressure treated, attached with a ledgerlok every 12 inches. I was very pleased to find almost no rot in the sills on this side of the house after prying off the lowest sheathing boards and replacing them.       Dumpster is getting closer to full...  Those stairs I mentioned? The tread boards were held down with 1.5" drywall screws. The boards were 3/4" thick, leaving 3/4" of screw in the stringers. So they popped out basically by hand. Also the top ends of the stringers were barely attached to the porch band joist using whatever random hardware was around and shimmed outward by up to 3 sections of untreated lath, so they basically fell off when I poked them with the wrecking bar. Also the stringers were apparently too small for the job because whoever built these stairs built the bottom stair first - and by built I mean they attached 3 pieces of tread board to 5 pieces of 6x6 beam as shown, slapped it all directly on the ground with no footing, and shimmed one end up with random chunks of pressure treated 2x4 attached to NOTHING - and then they used sections of 1x6 pressure treated scabbed onto the back ends of the 6x6s vertically to attach the fronts of the lower ends of the stringers to them. Oh and the stairs were 7 feet wide and had a whopping total of FOUR stringers under them. Stringers are supposed to be used under composite decking stair tread boards on 21 inch centers, right??? Idiots.    Then it was time to clean up 50+ years of blown litter from under the porch and mark the locations for the helical piles I will be using as footings. I was going to dig and pour concrete but I don't feel like digging 48 inch holes big enough to put an "elephant foot" footing form in, nor waiting for the formwork and hole to be inspected before pouring, nor ordering and placing several cubic yards of concrete, nor buying, mixing, and placing several cubic yards of concrete, nor waiting for it to cure. Helical piles of the size required to support a 5ft wide porch and 6ft wide roof are $220 each installed, so it was an easy choice.   Professional grade survey stakes.     Helical pile install day was Monday. It went... alright I guess. 2 of the 11 piles are for the stairs and can only be accurately placed once the rest of the porch is built. 1.5 were uncomfortably close to the expected position of the gas, water, and sewer lines, so we held off on those. 1 we hit bedrock only 1.5 feet below the surface. Given the uncertainty of 1.5 of the 3 midspan posts on the long side, we put all the midspan ones off. Ended the day with 5 of the expected 11 posts installed. Not bad for New England soil, which is 190% rock.   Well that's not gone well. This is after we got out my rotary hammer and 2-3/8" coring bit and bored about an 8 inch deep hole in the rock and retried with the helical pile hoping it would grab and split the rock. It's just crappy shale that's basically calcified baklava so we figured it would take care of it, but it turned out to be bedrock rather than just a large slab so the helical pile chewed about 2 inches off and then the rock laughed at us. Building inspector says I can just epoxy rebar pins into it and pour on top of this one and that's a weekend project so I'm not too concerned about it.  I kept drilling and got about 14 inches deep here and 20ish inches deep a few inches away with no sign of breaking through.  Also found the sewer line outside the foundation. Eyeballing it and having determined it goes at least 8-12 feet in a straight line, it looks like it goes directly under the intended location of the center support post on the long side, and I know the gas line does after digging for it more, so it's a good thing we called those ones off.  I have just finished redoing the plans after discussing the issues we ran into with the building inspector yesterday. He thinks, as do I, that going to dual 2x12 band joists and 2 midspan support posts (expected span 10'10", allowable w/ 40psf live load and 10psf dead load, wet service, 6ft joists, #2 southern yellow pine = 11'11") will meet code while avoiding putting a helical pile through a buried utility line. Hope to have the changes signed off on tomorrow morning so I can reschedule with the helical pile company and get this show on the road again.  That's actually all for now... caught up. The dumpster just got emptied last night and hopefully a fresh one will be delivered by tomorrow so I can do a little more cleanup. Hoping I can get the permit modified to cover siding and the remaining new windows I need to install when I go to discuss the plans tomorrow, because I'd love to get the rest of the dumpster filled with old siding and trim this weekend.
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Aug 9, 2019 02:41
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Holy poo poo. Did you find any cool trash under the old porch?
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Aug 9, 2019 04:47
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 Every update of this thread. I wish I had your...determination? I think I would have quit a long time ago and committed arson.
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Aug 9, 2019 13:02
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It's a way for kastein to practice before building his dream home. At least, I assume that's why he's been putting so much work into it.
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Aug 9, 2019 13:17
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I know exactly what it is
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Aug 9, 2019 16:33
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Unless Captain Ahab was at the helm of the Ship of Theseus I want no part of this comparison.
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Aug 9, 2019 17:57
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No really cool trash, just some random bits of pearlescent glass (probably from chemicals in the soil) and cobalt blue glass. Building plan amendments were approved this morning and I'm cleared to do the remaining 4 windows and all the siding and trim. Guess I'm marking the new helical pile locations this weekend, measuring for windows, and continuing porch construction.
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Aug 9, 2019 18:05
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Epoxied the rebar into bedrock. It's ultra crappy schist that's been through a few thousand years of freeze thaw cycles so it's pretty much like stale baklava, so I drilled 8 inches and epoxied them deep instead of the recommended 9 diameters (4.5 inches.) Trimmed the bottom of the tube to match the profile of the rock  4 epoxied in plus one each in the larger holes I drilled, which I filled with concrete and compacted using the rebar before inserting it in its forever home  Poured, compacted, and placed a couple slabs of granite on top to keep the tube from floating upward and pooping all my concrete out. Ignore the fact that I didn't backfill the hole before pouring like it says to.  I also marked the new locations for the two helical piles on the west side of the house, and finished locating the sewer and gas lines, which go within 4 inches of the original planned location for one of the 3 helical piles I had marked originally. Good thing I did digsafe's job for them, eh? Water main still AWOL, debating buying a pipe locator to hunt for it.
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Aug 13, 2019 03:48
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Out of curiosity: is it intentional that the rebar isn't vertical, or is it one of those "it doesn't matter so whatever" kinds of things? I could see an argument for the rebar holding better if it's at an angle (and if the pieces aren't all parallel), but I feel like any strength improvement would be pretty marginal compared to the fact that you're pouring hundreds of pounds of concrete in there.
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Aug 13, 2019 04:09
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kastein posted:Water main still AWOL, debating buying a pipe locator to hunt for it. Do a search for local private "Underground Utility Locators". If it's an iron pipe (or any conductive metal) one of them should be able to come out, connect to the pipe at your house and use their machine to locate it from there. Be a lot cheaper than buying your own machine for a one-time use (assuming you are talking about the same kind of machine that I used when I did this type of work). That type of thing usually is really lovely to locate, but if you get a solid locate from your house for a dozen feet, and then another one from the meter towards your house, you should have a pretty good idea of whether it's a straight line between them from that point.
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Aug 13, 2019 07:04
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Out of curiosity: is it intentional that the rebar isn't vertical, or is it one of those "it doesn't matter so whatever" kinds of things? I could see an argument for the rebar holding better if it's at an angle (and if the pieces aren't all parallel), but I feel like any strength improvement would be pretty marginal compared to the fact that you're pouring hundreds of pounds of concrete in there. Intentional. The aim is to keep the two from separating or the concrete from sliding to the side, since the stone is sloped. And those were also sorta the only directions I could go with the drill without hitting a lovely area of rock or not going very deep. The locator, I always wondered what your username meant until literally a few days ago I was looking at 160 dollar chinesium ones on Amazon, I only have to trace the pipe about 5 to 8 feet from the house to be sure it doesn't go under any of my new footing locations. And the water meter is right inside the foundation so I figure I can connect it to the ground rod 15ft away and the pipe going down into the ground and probably pick up a half decent signal for at least that far.
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Aug 13, 2019 13:47
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kastein posted:The locator, I always wondered what your username meant until literally a few days ago Didn't know they could be had for so cheap - the ones I used (it's been about 10 years ago now) were deep into the thousands, but of course they were meant to be used constantly all day every day. Might be able to get a private locator to come out for a simple locate like that for cheaper, but I suppose it depends on whether you think you might have a use for it in the future. Some water pipes are absolutely terrible at carrying a signal, so locating them can be pretty iffy. One thing you can try if you can't get a signal on it by connecting to the pipe, is to shut the water off at the meter/street, drain the pipe and get access at the house, and insert a metal fish-tape into the pipe and put the signal on that. It will be crappy because it's inside the pipe, but depending on the pipe it might be better than trying to push a signal down the actual pipe itself, especially if you are going through a fitting or two on the pipe.
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Aug 13, 2019 23:51
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It's clearly a crappy unit, don't get me wrong. They don't appear to have the multiple large receive windings that pro grade 4-figure units have. But I'm willing to maybe give it a shot and if it doesn't work well enough to find a pipe single-digit feet from where the signal generator is connected, file a return. We shall see. Interesting trick with the fish tape. I believe it's soft annealed copper tubing for a ways but not sure.
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Aug 14, 2019 00:32
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kastein posted:It's clearly a crappy unit, don't get me wrong. They don't appear to have the multiple large receive windings that pro grade 4-figure units have. But I'm willing to maybe give it a shot and if it doesn't work well enough to find a pipe single-digit feet from where the signal generator is connected, file a return. We shall see. If it's copper then even a cheap unit should get a great signal, although if it's direct buried the copper will be grounding the signal making it ugly also. The fish tape trick was something we used mostly for non-metallic pipes and conduits, but it's something else to try on metal water pipes. The biggest issue with metal water pipes is that the joints typically don't conduct the signal worth a drat, so it's really difficult to get a signal to go very far. If you crank the power up on the transmitter enough to push past a few joints, the signal will bleed onto everything in the ground and give you all kinds of false positives, making that type of pipe pretty much impossible to locate beyond 10'-30'. Since the metal is typically directly touching the ground, it's really tough to get a clear signal on it since the signal is going to ground along the entire pipe instead of just the far end like a good cable/wire locate. When a city locator is marking water lines (and sewers) they don't even bother with a machine, everything is located based on measurements from the as-built plans from known points on the line like valves or manholes. Good luck! Edit: another important point that I forgot. If you don't isolate the end of the pipe you are locating from, anything that's connected to it that conducts will also carry the signal and possibly cause all kinds of problems locating the line. The first thing we would do when locating a buried telephone/cable/fiber line was to disconnect the ground sheath/tracer from the ground at the point being connected to. You want the first ground to be as far from the connection point as possible in order to make the signal make a big loop through the cable/pipe to the other end where it's grounded, and then back through the ground to your ground rod. Not something you can really do with a metal pipe buried in the ground. The Locator fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Aug 14, 2019 |
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Aug 14, 2019 04:44
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Yeah it's direct buried and that's gonna suck. I am not sure if I can disconnect it at the meter without cutting the tamperproof wire seal on the meter, which clearly I don't want to do. There's a ground rod about 15 feet away perpendicular to the pipe that I can use, and can temporarily disconnect the house wiring ground from the main. Debating just having a pro do it.
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Aug 14, 2019 05:48
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kastein posted:Yeah it's direct buried and that's gonna suck. I am not sure if I can disconnect it at the meter without cutting the tamperproof wire seal on the meter, which clearly I don't want to do. There's a ground rod about 15 feet away perpendicular to the pipe that I can use, and can temporarily disconnect the house wiring ground from the main. Just FYI, even with a pro, that kind of a locate can be iffy at best. Sometimes they locate great, other times it's just impossible to get a clean signal, and there's no way to predict which one it will be.
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Aug 14, 2019 07:29
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Peeled the form off the footing to check for voids. Looks good from here! Got the first layer of the beam scabbed together temporarily to measure for the stair footing helical piles.  Measured for the new locations of the helical piles on the long side of the porch and marked the gas and sewer lines with the wrong color of paint (red.) Note one red mark is right next to the white circle that the helical pile was originally going in. The yellow gas line marking from NG was on the other side of the hole next to the work light. Thanks... (Once I positively located it I moved the flags.) 
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Aug 16, 2019 18:19
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Ordered lumber for the porch yesterday morning. Tossed half the 2x6s on the roof, the rest gets delivered Tuesday morning. Ended up using the roof instead of either truck because one is full of concrete debris and the other has a large rotary positioner in it that I want to build a CNC machine with and haven't unloaded. Partway through the short wing of the porch. Took a break from framing to repoint the foundation so I could do it sitting up instead of having no space to work.  My masonry skills are somewhat better than they were years ago when I last worked on my own foundation... Parents foundation 2014-2015 gave me a lot of practice.    Finished the joists and attached the outer 2x12 to the inner one forming the rim joist using a 2-7/8 headlok bolt every foot in a zigzag pattern.  I think that's all for this weekend, though I might get bored and replace more subflooring in the dining room shortly. Oh, windows are ordered for the remaining old ones in the kitchen and dining room, too.
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Aug 19, 2019 02:11
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Lumber order arrived this morning! Hopefully I can lay out the stair footing locations tonight and maybe even find the drat water main so I can get the helical pile company out again to finish the job.
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Aug 20, 2019 16:27
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