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Step 5Finally Finally a Point to all This
So Anyway.
My thought was if I ever actually managed to get a permit to build a proper bunker with fake windows and flat screens to stream scenes from around the planet according to ones mood, I would need to move out a lot of sand and clay and while it's fine to while away a few odd hundred hours on frivolous things like test shafts if I was to get under there with a bobcat I'd need a pretty dependable way of getting the spoils out or I'd be making a lot of trips back and forth up the hill which in itself is fun but in the real world I'd need to be pretty quick about getting the walls down and the less time spent just driving around is more time to pour concrete so I came up with a more permanent idea of making a very large check valve and forming a concrete basin to shoot water in and pump a sand slurry out as fast as I could scoop it in with the bobcat.
Dumb luck again or OCD I save things and happened to have a large weight from an old tool used to cut grooves in long leaf pines to collect the sap. I found it on my tree farm but it was missing the blade and the handle but I kept it even though at the time I didn't have a clue what it was.
It's a hundred year old 2 pound pear shaped piece of cast iron with a one inch hole through the middle of it and fits inside a 4 inch piece of schedule 40 but not in a 3 inch piece.
I stared at the odd pieces of 3 inch pipe I had from the previous attempts at sucking sand out from the crawlspace and got a 4 inch T with a threaded opening and some glue and a stainless steel bolt from Ace, made a few cuts and used a piece of chain I had laying around and managed to make a fairly decent check valve that lets a large amount of sand flow around it and with a bit of tweaking like slipping a piece of pipe around the chain to force more water up the pipe so it primes faster the thing actually seems to work.
I adjusted the height the weight rises by using the bolt though a link at the foot of the pipe so that it stays pretty centered in the T which has a little more room than just a section of 4 inch sch 40 and it rattles a bit but in a test run it moved a few wheel barrows worth of sand in a couple minutes with just 3 feet of water at the bottom of the pit.
I'm going to use a piece of pipe as a sleeve in the weight to force more water up the pipe than slips past so it primes faster but I don't want it absolutely water tight in case it gets clogged with sand I can just unscrew the access port at the bottom of the pipe and flush it out with water. You need to inject a strong stream of water right in front of the intake to keep the sand mixed up so I have the pipe resting in a five gallon bucket that I'll trim down to about 5 inches so the sand doesn't wear away the concrete but I believe if I could pump about 100 gallons a minute up from the lake into the pit as I sucked a slurry out with the trash pump I could move it out fast enough to keep up with me dumping BobCat sized buckets of sand into it and could use sand fence to collect the sand and use it in my back yard.
I'll mess with it a bit then when I get back to work on the bunker if ever the next step is a few big arches to tie in the columns to the far side of the crawl space and support a future ceiling and I'll install it permanently since it will also be useful if the thing ever flooded like an under ground swimming pool...
Some Assembly Required.
My thought was if I ever actually managed to get a permit to build a proper bunker with fake windows and flat screens to stream scenes from around the planet according to ones mood, I would need to move out a lot of sand and clay and while it's fine to while away a few odd hundred hours on frivolous things like test shafts if I was to get under there with a bobcat I'd need a pretty dependable way of getting the spoils out or I'd be making a lot of trips back and forth up the hill which in itself is fun but in the real world I'd need to be pretty quick about getting the walls down and the less time spent just driving around is more time to pour concrete so I came up with a more permanent idea of making a very large check valve and forming a concrete basin to shoot water in and pump a sand slurry out as fast as I could scoop it in with the bobcat.
Dumb luck again or OCD I save things and happened to have a large weight from an old tool used to cut grooves in long leaf pines to collect the sap. I found it on my tree farm but it was missing the blade and the handle but I kept it even though at the time I didn't have a clue what it was.
It's a hundred year old 2 pound pear shaped piece of cast iron with a one inch hole through the middle of it and fits inside a 4 inch piece of schedule 40 but not in a 3 inch piece.
I stared at the odd pieces of 3 inch pipe I had from the previous attempts at sucking sand out from the crawlspace and got a 4 inch T with a threaded opening and some glue and a stainless steel bolt from Ace, made a few cuts and used a piece of chain I had laying around and managed to make a fairly decent check valve that lets a large amount of sand flow around it and with a bit of tweaking like slipping a piece of pipe around the chain to force more water up the pipe so it primes faster the thing actually seems to work.
I adjusted the height the weight rises by using the bolt though a link at the foot of the pipe so that it stays pretty centered in the T which has a little more room than just a section of 4 inch sch 40 and it rattles a bit but in a test run it moved a few wheel barrows worth of sand in a couple minutes with just 3 feet of water at the bottom of the pit.
I'm going to use a piece of pipe as a sleeve in the weight to force more water up the pipe than slips past so it primes faster but I don't want it absolutely water tight in case it gets clogged with sand I can just unscrew the access port at the bottom of the pipe and flush it out with water. You need to inject a strong stream of water right in front of the intake to keep the sand mixed up so I have the pipe resting in a five gallon bucket that I'll trim down to about 5 inches so the sand doesn't wear away the concrete but I believe if I could pump about 100 gallons a minute up from the lake into the pit as I sucked a slurry out with the trash pump I could move it out fast enough to keep up with me dumping BobCat sized buckets of sand into it and could use sand fence to collect the sand and use it in my back yard.
I'll mess with it a bit then when I get back to work on the bunker if ever the next step is a few big arches to tie in the columns to the far side of the crawl space and support a future ceiling and I'll install it permanently since it will also be useful if the thing ever flooded like an under ground swimming pool...
Some Assembly Required.
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