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| Pick, pick, pick... |
Finally some more progress on this thing. We debated a long time about renting an excavator or some kind of trench digging machine. I tried poking at the hard ground a bit, and despite being very nasty to dig through, it is possible. I stopped at Harbor Freight on the way home last night and bough a pick-axe that was on sale for about $16 with a 5 lb head on it. A few whacks with that I realized this is the tool I needed! It will be sweaty work, and we have had a lot of 85 degree days too. A couple hours after work (and even after dark) and I feel I've made good progress.
I think by the weekend I'll have the trench dug, and possibly have conduit in place for power and internet. I'll need to find some CAT6a cable on the internet as well as power cable and put in an order for that. I think that can just be pulled through that easy enough.
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| Toward observatory site |
Next, a trip under the house crawlspace is in order to track down the power cables and make a splice for that and a hole in the wall to run it outside. Also, I'll probably just run a cable from the internet/network closet directly outside near the power, but with about 12 inches apart. 150 feet of that should be more than enough.
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| Looking toward house. |
2 comments:
Holy cow Tom! You are one devoted son of a gun. I would have rented a trench digging machine myself, but I don't have much muscle to work with. This looks like it is coming along really well. I can't believe you dug that entire thing on your own!
http://eas-astroblog.blogspot.com/2014/07/trench-digging-for-power-and-internet.html
I would have, but our ground here is extremely rocky. A trench machine would have probably been ruined. There are rocks between 3 inches up to 15 inches - and everything in between. I had to pull out a lot of very large rocks by digging around them. Not fun.
I'm NEVER digging a hole in the backyard again! :-)
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