Spencer's Pole Barn Project

[Spencer]

Re: Spencer\'s Pole Barn Project

Here is a picture showing the other side of the area I needed to clean up for the new driveway. It varied from 12 to 30 inches above the grade of the rest of the driveway. There were also 4 substantial stumps that needed to be persuaded to relocate to my stump pile.

 

[Spencer]

Re: Spencer\'s Pole Barn Project

This picture shows the first stump I relocated. You can see the flags and paint that mark where the buried cable line is. Only being able to work this stump from one side (because of the buired cable) made it much more difficult to get out. Normally I would have had this stump out in 10 to 15 minutes but this took me a good 45 or so.

 

[Spencer]

Re: Spencer\'s Pole Barn Project

This picture shows how shallow the cable is buried.

 

[Spencer]

Re: Spencer\'s Pole Barn Project

I dug up around 10 feet of this cable by hand. I wanted to get some slack in it because I will need to trench underneath it to run my new power lines to the pole barn.

 

[Spencer]

Re: Spencer\'s Pole Barn Project

My buddy who works for the power company was supposed to get me a 410 feet of wire on a spool. He gave the guys in the wire room a week to accomplish this task but they failed. I needed the wire by last Friday and they didn't have any partial spools with 410 feet or more. The largest partial spool they had was 340' which means they would have had to splice in another 70'. I objected strongly to this so my buddy put a full 1000' spool onto one of their trucks and drove it over to my place. As you can see in the picture its a pretty big spool, 1350 pounds plus the wood.

 

[Spencer]

Re: Spencer\'s Pole Barn Project

We just wrapped the cable around a clump of trees and he drove on down the driveway. We started beyond the pole barn and stopped near the transformer. We didn't have any good way to measure the wire so we just guessed (in my favor).

 

[Spencer]

Re: Spencer\'s Pole Barn Project

Here's the wire all piled up, it cant wait to get buried. I believe there is about 450' of wire there (actually 3 pieces each being 450'). There are three wires that are all wrapped around each other. Two of the wires are 350mcm and the neutral is 3/0 (all aluminum).

 

[Spencer]

Re: Spencer\'s Pole Barn Project

I went down the the lumber yard on Saturday morning to rent this Ditch Witch trencher. It is rated at 4" wide by 24" deep. I had very high hopes that this was going to be easy.

 

[Spencer]

Re: Spencer\'s Pole Barn Project

I figured I would start the trenching in the pole barn area first. I knew there wouldn't be any big roots in there because I had already dug them all out and filled it with nice clean fill sand. Because I had never operated a trencher before I wanted to start on an easy area. Unfortunately the wheels on the trencher didn't do very well in my nice clean fill sand /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif

 

[Spencer]

Re: Spencer\'s Pole Barn Project

This section of the driveway went pretty good. Even though the driveway is just dirt and sand at least it was pretty well packed down from the traffic so the wheels could get some traction. The curve was the hardest part to do on this section. I also had another buried cable to cross, right where the shovel is in the picture. At least this was my buried cable and not my neighbors. It is my phone line that also supplies me with high speed DSL internet access.