Construction Journal Entry Week of 8/14/11

8/15-17/11 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Monday through Wednesday.

I arrived at 12:40 and parked in the hairpin turn. There were only a couple of mosquitoes and no dogs to greet me. After lunch and a nap, I took my buckets into the woods and watered the 11 sequoia trees. The ground was pretty dry.

Next, I went to work chiseling the rock channel between Grids B1 and C1. Although I didn't have very comfortable places to kneel on, the access to the rock with the Bulldog was fairly good. I figured out a technique of drilling an array of vertical holes with a drill bit using a combination of rotation and hammering, and then following up using a flat chisel bit using the hammering only. This worked pretty well. I made quite a bit of progress before quitting for the day, very sore and tired, and going in for my shower. I could still barely see a lingering snow patch on Nason Ridge from the shower.

After dinner, I called Ron Scollard to check on his state of health. He is still laid up and isn't getting much better. He can work and drive as long as he is sitting, but he can barely walk or stand without a great deal of pain. He is still unable to come up and finish my taping job.

We agreed that it would be best to find someone else to finish the job and he has a friend in mind. He will contact his friend and get back to me on whether and when he can get to work. I wished him the best.

On Tuesday I went back out to work on the rocks between Grids B1 and C1. With my newly discovered techniques, I was able to finish the chiseling by lunch time. The channel I cut is very close to the final configuration I want for the drainage ditch, with little or no room or need for concrete. What I will do is to clean the detritus out as good as I can and then fill the low spots with bentonite powder and form a ditch using just the bentonite. I decided to do an experiment using rocks to make a basin, filling the cracks and seams with bentonite powder, and then filling it with water to see how it acts.

After lunch and a nap, I moved my chiseling operation to the space between Grids A1 and B1. Quite a bit of chiseling was required right at the Grid A1 corner, and also a couple of stretches of high points along the channel.

I used a short level as I went to try to figure out where I needed to cut. There is very little slope to the channel so here, too, there will be no room or need for concrete. That means that I have three full sacks of concrete mix left over to use somewhere else.

When I got the channel cut down to where I thought it might be enough, I carried two five-gallon buckets of water back there and poured them into the channel between Grids C1 and D1. This is still a fairly deep basin, that could hold quite a few more buckets of water, and it was this basin that was the worst culprit for holding water and letting it seep into the crawl space.

I watched the water drain completely out of that basin through the pipe at Grid C1 and into the next channel. Since there are deep spots in there, and probably cracks in the rock as well, the first 5 gallons was swallowed up and just barely made it to the pipe at Grid B1. The next bucket, though, ran right through the two pipes and into the space between Grids A1 and B1. It soaked into the low spots there too, but it made it all the way to the corner and then around the corner to flow downhill away from the cabin.

With the water standing in there, it was easy to see the high points of the rock. One of them was right at the corner, so I cut into the rock there with the Bulldog and cut away the rock dam. That let a lot of water out and I could then see the next high spots pretty clearly. I marked those with chalk and quit for the day.

I got to thinking about the concrete I had, and I decided to use it to make stairs up to the high rock at the back of the front porch. I went out and measured the rises and runs for the two pitches going up the rock, and then went in and did some calculations using the rule of 25 to design the stairs. I decided to make three steps on the steepest pitch at the top. That should just about use up the concrete I have.

On Wednesday morning I was just starting on my breakfast coffee when Larry knocked at the door. I invited him to come in and have a cup of coffee with me. He didn't want coffee so I made him a cup of Pero, which he seemed to enjoy.

He told me that Roberta wasn't doing very well, but from his description it didn't sound to me like she was much worse than the last time we had talked. He also told me the bad news that Ted Turner had suffered a serious stroke and that the left side of his body is now completely disabled. I'll miss seeing Ted, unless he can somehow get back up here for another visit.

Larry also got to see my bronze Mt. Rainier model and he watched me reconfigure the travel/storage case to display mode. He said he was as much taken by that case as by the bronze casting itself. Larry was fairly familiar with the park so he could identify several places on the model. I took a picture of him standing by the model.

After Larry left, I set up the rock basin experiment, lined it with bentonite, poured water into it, and took a picture of it. From first indications, I think that my plan to use bentonite only in those last two channels will work very well. I now have reason to hope for a dry crawl space next winter.

Next, I got some boards out and got a start on making the forms for the high rock stairs. I left for home at 1:00.



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