Friday, April 10, 2009

the bends

I've laid lots of pipe in my day. I also have installed a lot of metal coping on ramps before too. But doing the round wall was a bit different. We weren't absolutely sure what to expect and the first 45 minutes Lance and I were pretty nervous. I know it might be hard to believe, but our radius cuts weren't exact. Let's call it "natural variation". This is all good and dandy, but the pipe roller doesn't believe in this "natural variation" but rather "exact measurements". We had the pipe rolled at 46.5" and were gonna take our chances. This was a pretty good guess, but when we put it on the ramp we had to make some adjustments. How, you might ask? We cut the fucker. What, you might ask next? Well, ok, just the backside of the pipe.

If you look closely enough, you can see a little cut in the back of the pipe. This allowed us to open the pipe up and meet the actual radius of the corner. It worked pretty well, but we were a bit scared that the screws would fail and the pipe would pop off and break our legs. But it didn't and the future looks bright.



Oh yeah, on one of our test runs, Lance Lightfoot put a nice hole in the bottom of corner number 1. It was good and bad. Bad because it makes it tough to test it and good because it exposed the design failure early and now we can fix it before we get too far. But still, Lance could lay off the calories.

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