Last week I made a little trip to Kasson, MN. to help my son Chad get started on a deck project. Chad and his family live on an acreage and they have this pool that is 24 foot across. (How do I know? That is the total distance that I can swim before I start to sink.) His plan for this summer is to build a deck that will run along at least two sides of this pool. When finished it will be a deck that parents can sit on and watch their kids slash around and something that the kids can jump off of the edge and into the pool. The pool is three feet deep on one end and six foot deep on another end. Each summer it is something that gets a lot of use. (I should be soaking in it today.)
I planned to drive up and help for a couple of days. The first day would be to dig post holes in and around those sides of the pool where the deck would go. Chad would rent a post hole digger and in a half a day or so we would have the 21 holes dug that were on the plan. After that he would rent a cement mixer and we would cement the post in the holes. To the left is what is called a "One man Post Hole Digger". Standing beside this fancy invention is one of the hired help. The auger needs to be connected to the shaft that is hanging there and the goal was to dig each hole 42 inches deep in order to get the base of the post hole below the frost level for that area. Sounds pretty simple. Just need to have some gas. This rig rents for two hours - four hours - or all day. We planned to have it back in four hours and be mixing cement after that.
After four holes we decided that we should call the rental place and let them know that we were not going to be back with the machine in four hours. We got the feeling that we would be going for the "all day" rental rate. We discovered that there was approximately 20 inches of nice black soil which we spun through fairly easily. The next 22 inches of soil was a gooey, sticky, water logged yellow clay. The clay was so tacky that it would stick around the auger and did not want to feed upwards. There were times that the auger would tend to seize up. When that happened, we could neither go deeper nor could we reverse the auger and return back to the surface.
So, the one man post hole digger became a four man project. It took a little over twenty minutes a hole to get down to 42 inches. As soon as we would pull the auger out of the hole, water would fill in. The clay looked like the clay that one would use to make pottery. As we were cleaning the auger off I mentioned to one of the granddaughters that we could pretend that it was gold. (Trying to think of something that would lighten the mood a little - It's a grandpa thing.) She only replied that if it was gold, we would hire somebody else to dig these holes. (Hmmm.) Finally, after 8:00 pm we finished digging the last hole. (I slept well that night. I would put digging post holes in the same category as sanding or sweeping the shop.)
We did get the machine back before the twenty four hours were up. Next we came home with the cement mixer. Chad had 170 - 60# bags of complete cement mix. Each hole had about two feet of water in it. We figured that we could take some of the bags of dry cement and dump roughly seven bags in the hole, plunged a rake handle up and down to mix the cement, wait a little while for the water to settle down and then apply about three bags of mixed cement in the balance of the hole to finish it out. In case you have not done the math - 10 bags per hole times 21 holes would mean that we would need 210 bags of cement mix. (During the process, it was not a good time to bring that calculation up.)
To the left is a picture of a green treated post cemented in the hole. We did some that way and we also did some where we filled the hole full of cement and installed an "L" bolt with the treads showing. There is a special bracket that can be mounted on that bolt and the post is mounted on the bracket. We ended up with 3 holes that we could not finish because we ran out of cement. At that time it was late Saturday afternoon and the project was on hold. We lost our hired labor as the vote was to pull the cover off the pool and everyone could take a dip in the nice cool water. (That is except for grandpa who at the end of the day probably would have difficulty swimming the necessary 24 feet.)
I did not end up with any pictures of the site when we finished up for the day. For me, it was time to clean up and get back on the highway. I'll return another day when the cement has dried and the clay will be forgotten and it will be time to hang the stringers and what ever else can be done. In the mean time the granddaughters and I are holding out for a wage increase. To the right, our mafia picture. (Look tough girls - don't smile. There are stories of people who ended up buried in cement over a labor dispute.) 
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