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full of little hills Wednesday, September 3 2014
Among a few other things today, I managed to jackhammer away the last of the flat surface that I recently exposed by removing what I could of that hard layer of bluestone. The stuff that I blasted loose came up very easily and seemed to be comprised of a mix of shale and bluestone in undulating layers. The resulting surface was full of little hills that seemed significantly tougher than the rock that had broken off to expose them. There was a fair amount of water and even clay in the rock, indicating it had existing cracks and that water drains from it slowly.
At this point, I'm down a little more than five feet into the bedrock. I'm down so far that I'm starting to worry about things up above me that could topple over and land on me, particularly a large pot of soil with a volunteer Slippery Elm growing in it, though there are also a scattering of special rocks up there with interesting features (mostly fossils) that I've found along the way.
Late this afternoon, I drove out to 9W mostly to get provisions from Home Depot (as well as more liquor for my laboratory liquor cabinet; this time I got the usual big plastic two-litre bottle of cheap gin and, instead of bourbon, a litre of cheap scotch). I needed to replaced two five gallon buckets (one that I drove over yesterday, and the other that was destroyed by ice expansion last winter). I also wanted a heavy duty bucket with a pulley-compatible handle to replace the one I've been using to remove rock fragments from the greenhouse. That bucket still works, but it has a couple bad cracks in the bottom and will definitely fail at some point. I'm also moving ahead with a plan to build an overhead rail with a wheeled dolly that can roll along it and, using an attached tackle system, raise buckets from the hole in the floor. The rail will be a fourteen foot piece of two by six lumber attached high in the middle of the east and west walls and I will have to build a dolly to run along it using metal plates, 3/4 inch wood, and casters. So while I was at the Home Depot, I also bought some metal attachment hardware and a 16 foot piece of pressure-treated two by six, which (despite its length) is fairly easy to transport on the Subaru's roof rack.
Size reality check sketch for the dolly that will run on the central rail (the cross section of which is the large rectangle in the middle).
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