Friday, May 11, 2007

Ex Post Facto

When we put the pool in I built a fence around it. Twelve years later I decided it needed to be changed. Apparently when I put in the posts I used lots of concrete. Stupid twit. So I had to take out six posts. Ladies, this is way effing harder than frogging the last twenty rows. Anyway, the first post came out with a huge amount of huffing and puffing, a splintered post, and a pile of concrete crumbs. The second one was better, but still involved a sledgehammer and LOTS of sweating. On the third one I made a contraption using a hydraulic jack to lift the post out a little bit at a time. That was better, but still took a long time and involved lots of kneeling on the ground and bending over awkwardly. On the fourth one I used the same contraption but I put the rig up on some sawhorses. This was better yet, but still took a long time. The stroke of the jack (stop giggling) was largely taken up in bending all the parts and the lifting effect was limited by the lever arm of the contraption...

So today for post #5 and #6 I used a more direct lifting method which you see here. This is post #6, where I had finally perfected my kludge:





















After Andy saw this he said, you need an engine hoist.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You're *my* hero. That is very cool and ingenious, Bob. That gets you two (*)(*) up!