The Excavation Begins

Today turned out better than expected. I was dreading many things going wrong - but they didn't. Things didn't go perfectly - the auger was missing a tooth so the hole was a bit too small for the pier liners.

The guys turned up just before 7am and dutifully waited for the council approved kick off time before starting up the machine.

The guy (Glen) drilled the holes. Before hand I explained about the geology - a weak sandstone seam running about 600mm deep. He gave a knowing nod when he hit it. The 450mm holes were a bit of a problem. Because the auger was missing a tooth, we spent a lot of time reaming them out to fit the liners - we resorted to pushing them down with the excavator with mixed success.




The next stage was the trench. The guy was very careful and did a really good job. I used a laser level to maintain accuracy. He seemed to be able to get it done to the centimeter accuracy.



It was a bit tricky with the west end the trench - Glen had to stradle the two sides of the trench with mixed success. Eventually we resorted to using a few of my salvaged timbers to reduce the pressure on the ground. It still caved in a little bit, but I was happy with the result.



Glen was very dubious about what I was planing, he kept on asking questions like whether I was planing on going into the trench and telling me that he hoped it would not rain soon. However, once I hand auger my first hole and poped a post in, he came over saying that he had to see this and went back to the excavator saying that he was very impressed.

It was about lunch time when they finished so I took up the offer of getting some of the dirt taken away.