Of Magnetism and a Sunday morning Crane Installation….

Okay people. Sunday is blog day for me but I had to go into work today to finish putting up another crane on 58th street.

Translation: I really didn’t get much time to write this blog post. On top of that those dreaded New England Patriots just beat up the New York Giants 26-24 with 6 seconds remaining in the game. I can’t  believe it. I hope there aren’t too many New England fans out there reading the blog but I just can’t stand the Patriots. And the Giants had them beat, too. Disappointing. Very disappointing.

….but welcome back and of course I’m glad you’re here again as usual! Don’t know how far I’m going to get here because I’m getting a very late start. (Stop you’re sobbing Jim and get going will ya!)

Okay, here we go.

So they installed the crane on 58th street Saturday but when they went to fly the boom in, it was too windy so they had to do it Sunday. I got the call  so in I went. The boom installation is pretty dangerous. Especially if the wind starts moving the boom when it’s in the air. Gotta remember the boom weighs in at about 35,000 pounds, so once it starts to spin things can get a bit hairy, as they say. Here’s a picture.

If you look closely at the base of the crane you will see that the crane is actually sitting on a huge steel structure that is cantilevering over the edge of the slab. When you see this one up close you just hope that whoever designed this thing knew what he was doing. The crane on the right picked the boom out of the street and is now holding it in place while they pin it together.

Oh yeah, one other thing before I forget. I had my web guy Jason, ( J and B Web and Photo) list all the blog posts on the first blog page when you click on Hobbit Hollow Construction Blog. It’s pretty nice. So if you want to back up and look at a particular post you can see everything in one fell swoop so to speak. For some reason I wanted to revisit “A Polar Vortex….Oh Yeah and Get Rid of that Pumpkin!” Well, I don’t think the titles are going to help you find much. But it’s there if you’re looking for it.

So Terence and I went over to the house Saturday and got a bit done. Terence was going to the Pawling Girls Regional Volleyball game at noon so I only had him for a bit. If the volleyball team won they would have made it to States. But alas no, ’twas not to be. I had Terence dismantle the railing on the East side so we could get ready for backfill. Here’s the lad at work.

The other thing I did was finish the footing insulation after the railings were dismantled.

I put mira drain over this and all that has to be done now is cover the footing gravel with filter fabric and we’re good to go.

Almost forgot the title of my post! Magnetism. So during the course of construction nails and all other kinds of metal stuff get dropped or fly all over the place. So when I’m backing my truck up on the site I’m always a little leary of getting a flat. So I brought the magnet out. So I have this magnet on wheels that you roll over the area in question and it picks up any metal object that it goes over. Once you roll it over the area there is a lever you pull that brings the magnet away from the ground and this releases all the objects that were collected. Hmmm. You’re not getting it? Maybe this picture will help.

I really don’t know what it’s called but you can see all the nails I picked up right? Oh yeah, and remember that 12 mm socket the boys lost back in blog post #68? Guess what? I found it!!!

Me: What happened to the 12 mm socket? The boys collectively:I don’t know.  I put it back in the tool box. Me: Yeah, right.

One other item of note. The windows cleared customs last week from Ireland so hopefully in about two weeks we should have our window delivery. Hmmm. Got a long way to go on the framing front before we’re installing those babies. One step at a time though.

Hope to see you all back next week! Thanks for stopping by!

Jim