Jerry Burley is back with a bad case of the piles.....(and not the Emma Freud variety either)
"Brian", he says, "More ramblings from the wanderings. Or wonderings about the rumblings maybe. It was Saturday afternoon and with nothing better to do as the beer was still warm somewhere and the rugby had yet to start, we thought we'd give the Delmag diseasall hammer a workout and knock a couple of bits of discarded, local Garden Centre-supplied drainpipe into the ground to occupy us."
Pretty self explanatory really and again no weighty tome required to support the pix (BLB breathes a further sigh of relief - there is one coming soon though....)"
"Nice to see our old Cat 3 Iveco back on the road after some surgery to its roads-destroyed radiator (at the very top) and the Bedford snuck in under the radar again too, with the inevitable Chinky Benz thrown in to boot!"
"Bit of cut and shut on the 30" pipes, with toothed shoes to be welded on to the drive end, took a little while, lift the finished article up and into the drill cellar, straighten it all up with some baler twine and flattened squeezy bottles as packing shims and drop the D62-22 on top (whose 18 tonne dead weight alone was enough to push the conductor pipe down a metre under self-weight - you can put a zero on to that for the effective dynamic weight)."
"Pull the red Bat-rope and like Vic's outside sh$%house door in a gale, bang, bang, bang. About 3" per strike and the whole 12m of pipe was in the ground in about 10 minutes. Then remove the hammer, put another length on top, park the pigeon over it to stick it all together again and start over."
"As can be seen, the life of the pile driver is just one great party......this thing could be heard 5kms away and maybe you can see the camera shake on the video clip as the whole drillpad moved with each strike, and its Puffing Billy impression could also be well seen from afar."
"I don't know what the Noise Abatement Society Stasi thinks of percussion hammers but then I suppose who cares - we're in Africa, they're not! Regards, Jerry."
Now JB is this one of those auto pipe cutters in action?
On the way up..and click through here for more...
Jerry's venerable 6x4 EuroTech...cab looks surprisingly good...next to the crane...
There's the driver...at least I think it's a driver...
Where else could you find such esoteric stuff eh?
I can hear it now, donk, donk, donk...
I've forgotten...what did they want to drive piles in the ground for?
And that's a pile alright....
You should know Jerry by now, Brian! He probably got his guys to drive the piles just so he could take some photos to keep the rest of us entertained. And why not?
Vic,
Bored and stupid we often are (but not often THAT bored and stupid), and there is a Part Two to this seemingly pointless exercise other than a day trip (or a week as it transpired) out for a hammer, as will be revealed when it actually all happens over the next couple of weeks......watch this - or a very similar - space!
R
J
We're looking forward to it!