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Happiness is....
- Thread starter Constantin
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- May 19, 2017
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Depends. Mums house needed a deeper basement so they jacked it up. Then found bedrock below, drilled, inserted lots of tnt, followed by layers upon layers of shredded car tires wired to each other.
one blast was a bit more aggressive than it should have been. As mum and the builder looked on, the house lifted off the I-beams into the air. The windows held, the one remaining item in the house (an upright piano) moved from one side of the room to the other. Horsehair plaster walls held too. mum turned to the builder and drily remarked that the next time they ought to use less TNT. The house only shifted a few inches so the builders were able to coax it back into alignment later.
If you think that is crazy, consider my experience at LL Beans main store in the early 1990’s. I was there at about 2 am when they were working on expanding the store down the hill towards Main St. Since the store is open 24hrs/day (the doors have no locks) they were blasting granite bedrock within 50’ of customers. Imagine wandering about when three air horn honks interrupt your early morning lèche-vitrine, followed by a terrific rumble and disturbed dust raining from the roof beams above. I wonder how they ever got the sign off from the insurance company on that one.
one blast was a bit more aggressive than it should have been. As mum and the builder looked on, the house lifted off the I-beams into the air. The windows held, the one remaining item in the house (an upright piano) moved from one side of the room to the other. Horsehair plaster walls held too. mum turned to the builder and drily remarked that the next time they ought to use less TNT. The house only shifted a few inches so the builders were able to coax it back into alignment later.
If you think that is crazy, consider my experience at LL Beans main store in the early 1990’s. I was there at about 2 am when they were working on expanding the store down the hill towards Main St. Since the store is open 24hrs/day (the doors have no locks) they were blasting granite bedrock within 50’ of customers. Imagine wandering about when three air horn honks interrupt your early morning lèche-vitrine, followed by a terrific rumble and disturbed dust raining from the roof beams above. I wonder how they ever got the sign off from the insurance company on that one.
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Remarkable stories.
- Joined
- May 19, 2017
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Agreed. Over at Harvard they regularly move older campus homes to make room for a new underground garage or some other multimillion $$ campus feature. Wood is remarkably flexible and forgiving even in these 1800's homes that are dry as matchsticks. The combination of I-beams and the big bogeys with 6' tires (they look a lot like airplane landing gears) apparently make house movement relatively straightforward.
To me, the “big ones” are moving large brick homes, lighthouses, or trees. The former two because brick is anisotropic and will not tolerate tension nearly as much as compression. The latter because the root systems somehow have to be preserved. Mums initial house was a collection of farm houses that had been put together over the years as families in the area abandoned their homesteads. Over field and dale, the abandoned homes were dragged over and joined to the main house. Likely with teams of horses, not trucks, as the area was dirt poor after WWII.
Over in Boston, that anisotropic quality of bricks gave the "Big Dig" contractors fits as much of the older house infrastructure around this massive digging project was brick, from the 1800's, and built on unstable landfill. IIRC, over 1/3 of the total cost of that project was mitigation-related, including examining any and all foundations near the dig for cracks, fitting meters over said cracks if they were found to document crack propagation, etc. Nothing like trying to build a cut and fill tunnel under an existing interstate highway overpass. At the train yard in South station, they froze the ground and tunneled entirely from below.
ornias
Wizard
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One doesn't have to be old to rescue old goodies...
- Our kitchaid is a refurbished 70's k5 from the USA
- Powered by an ancient dutch autotransformer, so old the manufacturer needed to dig in their archive because they didn't believe me it was theirs.
- Our knive sharpener 20+ years old Tormek knive sharpener, fully refurbished
- Coffeemachine: heavily modified 7-10 year old Jura s9 (the best model without the modern touchscreens and LCD crap.)
- Blender: about 10 year old vitamix (the good old model, build like a rock without stupid touchscreens)
- Personal laptop: 7 year old Macbook Pro.
Thats just the equipment I kept though...
Always prefer to buy used, even if used+fixing ends up being slightly more expensive. (Always try to get improved parts, like the new 8 dollar Viton X-rings, instead of the default O-rings for my jura) and love modding things when I can!
- Our kitchaid is a refurbished 70's k5 from the USA
- Powered by an ancient dutch autotransformer, so old the manufacturer needed to dig in their archive because they didn't believe me it was theirs.
- Our knive sharpener 20+ years old Tormek knive sharpener, fully refurbished
- Coffeemachine: heavily modified 7-10 year old Jura s9 (the best model without the modern touchscreens and LCD crap.)
- Blender: about 10 year old vitamix (the good old model, build like a rock without stupid touchscreens)
- Personal laptop: 7 year old Macbook Pro.
Thats just the equipment I kept though...
Always prefer to buy used, even if used+fixing ends up being slightly more expensive. (Always try to get improved parts, like the new 8 dollar Viton X-rings, instead of the default O-rings for my jura) and love modding things when I can!
