Wednesday, July 17, 2013

We Are Literally On A Roll Now

Don't you love it when people misuse the word "literally".

That spider literally scared the crap out of me!

Ewwww!   Well, I suppose that it's possible, but hopefully not what actually happened.

But we are literally on a roll with the backhoe tire.


When I arrived at Earl's house early yesterday, he was already working on the tire, despite the already oppressive heat and humidity.  

Previously, we tried to plug the hole from the outside but it was too big.   We broke the bead on the tire with the backhoe  and we patched it from the inside.  But now we were having a problem inflating the tire.  The rim is 24" wide and air pressure wasn't pushing the tubeless tire sidewalls out so it would seal.  That's when we decided to call it a day and ruminate on the problem.

Earl had a revelation during the night and started early, putting a come-along on it and was compressing the middle of the tire, forcing the tire's bead out to the edge of the rim.  



We got it really close, as you can see in the photo above.  But Earl's air compressor wasn't pumping air in fast enough to overcome the leaks around the bead.  Finally, admitting defeat, we hied ourselves to H&M Equipment in Amsterdam and bought a $68 inner tube.  That worked.


I guess we should have just done that to begin with.


Messing with a backhoe tire isn't easy, let me tell you.  It's heavy.  And trying to do something like mounting the tire on the backhoe's hub was a real chore, especially lining up the bolt holes.  Toss in 90 degree heat and masses of black flies and you've got a real job.

It took a large quantity of both work and victory beers.  But it's done.


Oh, and we also met with John the Architect yesterday morning.  He's getting very close on finalizing plans that Pam likes and we have a footprint for the foundation.  We even staked it out.  That helped a lot, and I think we're going to stake it out again though, orienting the house more in a southerly direction actually using a compass instead of "I think south is thataway."

Earl and I can start digging with the backhoe to see what we've got in the hill where the house is going to go.  We might even start today.  I'll bet we'll find rocks.  Lots and lots of rocks.

2 comments:

  1. I remember well the day we staked out the footings for the "new addition" to the cottage in the Northern Neck. First perspective of our new home was pretty exciting. Too bad the surveyor ignored the orientation to the existing cottage and chose the river view he liked best. When it came time to build the breezeway between old and new, it would have to be skewed about 15 degrees. It eventually turned into a hexagonal gazebo between the two buildings, which we like a lot. But it caused some head scratching for a while. Lesson learned? Pay strict attention to the footprint's orientation from the start. Good luck. Hoping for no more tire issues on either tractor.
    Tom carter
    Leatherneck

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    1. Thanks Tom.

      As for orientation, I even went to a NOAA website to get the magnetic declination for Bleecker to make sure I find true south. It's 13.43 degrees west.

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