Excavation...

This last Monday I finally got a guy out to dig the footings for the house.  It's been a rough go to get that started.  

I set and re-set batter boards for laying the foundation five times to get the dimensions just right, which took a great deal of time and was probably ill advised, but I can't argue because it was my own council I was keeping.  

I'd long considered renting a mini-excavator from Home Depot and doing the work myself, but then I saw and ad for a guy on KSL saying he'd work for $65 and hour.  I couldn't imagine it would take him more than two hours, as the excavations were really pretty minor.  $130 for two hours of a professional with a full sized backhoe compared to $440 (I think) for a day with a rented mini was too big a price disparity to ignore.

The only problem is that I desperately, desperately hate making phone calls to people I don't know.  I think I have abnormal speech patterns, or a strange voice, or maybe both, and I often find that strangers on the other side of a telephone don't understand what I'm saying.  I think I must rely a lot on non-verbal cues too to communicate, and they are obviously absent from phone calls.

Additionally, I desperately, desperately hate asking people for help, especially strangers.  I once spent an hour and a half in the New York Public Library just watching people to figure out how their circulation system worked, rather than getting the answer in a minute by asking one of the librarians.

But, given that renting equipment would involve a fair amount of dealing with strangers and filling out official forms (another particular emotional stressor of mine), and the price disparity, I finally called the guy with the ad up and arranged with him to come do it.  But he never showed up, and never called me back.  

After a week of trying to get a hold of him and failing, I girded up my loins, or in other words, gathered my manhood, and went to the Home Depot two Saturday mornings ago.  There I went through the emotionally taxing process previously described, and after 30 minutes or so in the rental office, I was pulling the truck around to hitch up the trailer with the tractor.  Then the guy stopped me and said he couldn't rent it to me because my hitch ball was bumper mounted, rather than frame mounted.  He asked if I could go borrow or rent a truck somewhere else.  I considered it then said no.  So I went back in and spent 15 minutes more undoing what I'd theretofore done.

Another week went by while I tried to think of people I'd feel comfortable asking to borrow a truck, but finally I decided to go back to the guy on KSL.  I called him and left another message, then  called him again and got him.  He said he was on another job that was going long, but he could schedule me for the next monday morning.  That was this last Monday morning.  This time he showed up.

I really thought he was going to make short work of it.  After all, he had a 20 inch bucket on his backhoe, and it was deep.  And the arm was much longer than on the tractor I tried to rent.  And he was a professional, with 26 years of experience.  It said right in his ad that he could "do rings around mini-excavators".  So I explained my staking to him and the width and depth of the excavations, and I sat back to watch the master at work.

A surprising amount of time went by while he bumbled through the first wall's excavation.  He was very painstaking as he dug beside the batter boards I'd so carefully laid out and staked.  None the less he bumbled his digging and pulled out two of four of the boards that delineated that wall.  And it took him two and a half hours to do it.

I realized at that point that I'd forgotten my checkbook, so I rode home to get it and eat my lunch.  By the time I got back he'd mostly completed cutting the trenches for the interior bearing walls.  He had, however, dug them crooked.

He then proceeded to the north wall, and by that time seemed to be embarrassed by how long it was taking.  He went a little faster, and dug out three of four batter boards on that side, and buried three or four of the steel stakes then compacted the earth over them with the wheels.  Then he ran over one of the smaller batter boards and splintered it.

When he was digging out the foundation for the shed he far overcut the stakes, then buried them too.  To fill those footings will take almost twice the volume of concrete than was called for.

Then he cut out the berms at the south and east ends of the yard that the county wanted me to get rid of for drainage.  This involved him getting confused and piling all the dirt up in the south east corner, until I reminded him the the north west corner was supposed to be the highest spot in the yard.  We were rolling up on six and a half hours at that point, and he was obsessively trying (but failing) to level the huge grassy pile of  what used to be the berms back into the west side of the yard.  He was just pushing and pulling the dirt back and forth, all the while with a huge grin of crazed concentration.  I pulled the plug.

$422.50 was the final bill.  It was a mess of a job, and I've spent two days out there so far, and will I suspect spend about a week more, just trying to fix his work with my little $6 shovel.

I took one lesson from it.  For almost the same price, if I could have worked out the truck thing, I could have done it myself and got the experience to boot.  And if I'd screwed it up, at least I wouldn't feel like I'd been cheated.

To be fair, the guy did try hard, and I very much doubt anyone had ever asked him to dig with the precision I was asking with my constraining batter boards.  Especially not on a crampingly small lot like mine.  It was a mistake to hire an elephant to do the job of, I don't know, maybe a badger.  He was just too big to do the job well.

None the less, this marks a pretty significant step on the way.  It's a step I was afraid to take, because it made it feel real and irrevocable.  So I guess it's really begun.

My Brakes Were Made of Apple Sauce...

It had been some time since I'd been to Cache Valley when I received a phone call from Ron College saying that a registration renewal card had come for my motorcycle.  So I decided to go up and get it.  This also provided an opportunity to avail myself of Mike Forsberg's experience in auto mechanics.  The truck has a few significant faults that have needed clearing up, and I don't feel so confident as to take care of them by myself.

Originally I was thinking that a good first point would be to fix the front driveshaft.  I think that the kid who owned it before me was probably out digging and got into something he couldn't get out of.  For anyone who has sadly forgotten their Cache Valley-ese, diggin' is going out in a wet field, putting the vehicle in four wheel drive, and driving around with the accelerator floored.  This produces a shower of mud and cuts trenches in the field.  Diggn' is to dumb teenage hicks with four wheel drive vehicles as the train is to the peacock; a way to display virility to susceptible females of the species.  In humans, this behavior is often of limited effectiveness, as it is not often possible to lure a female of the species out into a wet muddy field to watch the display.  In such a case, it usually serves as a means of convincing competing males of the subject's superior virility.  Because every male knows deep, deep down that one's virility is determined by the power output of his vehicle's engine and the rate at which it can consume fuel.

Also, diggin' is... really fun.

Anyway, given that my truck is an excellent machine for converting gasoline into noise instead of power, I suspect it wasn't too hard for the kid who owned it to get himself in over his head far out in a wet field.  The sensible thing to do at this point is use a winch if you've got it, or get a friend with a bigger truck, or better still, a tractor, to pull you out.  But remember the ostensible purpose of digging?  Such sense reduces the sperm count and sex organ size exponentially.  I think that he then probably just stood too hard on the gas and the rusty old drive shaft broke at the u-joint.

Originally I thought the broken bits were still connected to the u-joint, but upon closer inspection I found they were gone forever, dead and buried in some Clarckston farmer's field.  So there would be no driveshaft welding for me.  A new one is $250, and four wheel drive hasn't really proven necessary for me.  So the driveshaft is on hold.

Item two on the list was the titular apple sauce brakes.  All mush, with the brake pedal almost on the floor.

The first thing Mr Forsberg and I did after I bought the truck was to bleed the brakes.  They felt far better when we did, and I thought we'd cracked it.  But within two days they were mush again.  In the time between this weekend and then I've developed a very healthy following distance on the road.  In fact it saved me on the freeway a couple weeks ago.  I came upon a seven car pileup very rapidly, and was able to use my eight to ten car length following distance to slow way down and swerve onto an off ramp.  The guy too close behind me locked up his brakes trying to stop and fishtailed into the cement barrier at slow speed.

None the less, it was obvious from the beginning that the brakes as they were weren't going to cut it in the long run.

I thought that the problem must be the master cylinder.  There was a mess of fluids covering everything in the engine bay, and I though some of it could be brake fluid, leaked from bad seals on the master.  So I stopped at Autozone on the way to Cache Valley and got a new reconditioned unit.  When I arrived around two in the afternoon on Saturday, Mr. Forsberg pointed out that although I hadn't seen any leaking on the wheel cylinders on the front brakes, the rears were drums, and you wouldn't be able to see leaking brake fluid inside of them.  He thought we should check them first, and it is well we did.  They were a complete shambles.



These are a new pair of brake shoes.  They surround the hub in a drum brake, and when you step on the brake pedal, a little hydraulic actuator pushes them outward against the steel drum that caps the assembly.  It's kind of like bicycle brakes, except rather than squeezing in on the rim, it pushes out on the drum.  See that half an inch of grey stuff on the outside of the shoes?  That's what rubs on the drum and stops the vehicle.  FYI, they used to make that of asbestos, so if you're changing old drums, try not to breath.  Because those pads turn into a really fine dust when they burn down.

Anyway, here's a picture of the brake shoes we discovered when we removed the drums.

That shiny stuff you see is bare metal.  It's not that effective for stopping.  Also, the internals were indeed wet with leaked brake fluid.  The hydraulic cylinders were rusted messes, and the whole mechanism on the driver side had failed and started coming apart.  The shoe on the bottom in the picture below was from the driver side.  

See how it is worn into an abnormal shape?  That's because the cylinder and one of the springs had failed.  The result was that the shoe and eventually the drum had gone wonky and were slowly self-destructing.

And craphands but it was a mess to put them together.  We worked on it from 2:00 in the afternoon Saturday until about 10:30 at night.  The reason we stopped then was that we got a defective wheel cylinder.  The hole into which the brake line screwed was too large, so it wouldn't thread.  We worked on that for about an hour and a half alone before we gave up on it and tried to take it back.  Unfortunately Autozone was closed for the day.  We went the next morning.  It was our fifth trip during the project.

With the exception of a couple relatively sizable breaks, we worked on them from around noon Sunday until around 9:30 that night.

Mr Forsberg swore in no uncertain terms that he would never, ever, ever help me with a set of drum brakes again.  I'm not much more inclined to tinker with them.  They're an amazing pain.