Stonewall, Colo.
Posted on 12/18/2009 2:53:04 PM PST by posterchild
An Indian villager burrowed for 14 years with a hammer and chisel to cut a tunnel through a mountain so that his neighbours could reach nearby fields and he could park his truck outside his home.
Ramchandra Das, 53, who lives in eastern Bihar state, carved a 10m-long, 4m-wide tunnel through the hill range from his village of Kewati. Das took up the Herculean task after villagers found the 7km trek over the mountain increasingly arduous.
When the authorities refused to help to cut the journey time, Das began carving his way through the earth in the direction of the nearest big town, Atri. The job became more pressing when Das became the first man to own a truck in the village and was unable to drive it to his home.
"I could not park my truck near my house since the mountain blocked my path," he told Reuters. Das said he was also afraid of bandits stealing his truck. "I had to leave my truck miles away, so I decided to do something about it myself," Das said by telephone.
Local villagers, who previously had to trek around the mountain, are now using the tunnel to get to work.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
In 1986 I watched four Mexican workers in Cancun add an entire floor to a hotel under construction using the same five gallon pail method and hand cutting and bending the rebar. It was amazing.
And FWIW, the family were second generation polish immigrants. Hard workers who wasted no time on silly consumerism. Anytime you went to their home, there was homemade bread and stew, home made wine, and we never saw a television in the home.
I’ve considered something similar for the 400 square feet of crawl space I have. I have a partial basement.
Trouble is that the soil is nearly as hard as concrete, which is why it wasn’t dug out in the first place. Everything will have to be chistled out.
.......Everything will have to be chistled out.....
Think hammer drill
Got one, it’s still a monumental job!
Ice Auger, post hole auger connected to a 1.5HP electric motor and a 50/1 gearbox does the trick. You use a block and tackled come along to side angle drill into the hardpan. Once you have a 1’ hole, you use a 10 ton bottle jack to heave the soil above. All done quietly and cleanly.
Where's the high occupancy diamond lane? Are the restrooms spaced no more than one kilometer apart, with handicapped accessible facilities? We'd better not find any of those old energy-wasting incandescent bulbs in there, or else.
It appears that this Gaia-rapist dug his tunnel directly through the world's only known habitat of the endangered carnivorous grunge worm. You can add ecological genocide to his list of violations.
Nice try there Mr. Individual Initiative, but your crime spree ends today. You can break rocks in prison.
Seal 'er up at both ends, boys.
I farmed until 1986 and have a lot of experience with all those kinds of things, built and used them.
For my situation, the most practical would be a small Bobcat and trencher.
Wish I could do what I did when we dug out 8 6 foot wide, 3 foot deep, 55 feet long trenches in the hog barn, hydraulic auger on a Bobact -— 4” hole, fill with feritlizer-—— and a bit a dynamite, boom, everything was loose in a second.
10 meters long? Mountain?
Can’t get a bobcat in the basement. A bobcat or any skidsteer is a real tipoff to the zoning people. Nobody wants a gasoline or diesel engine running in their basement either.
FWIW, the less you blast/fracture surrounding soils, the less likely to develop foundation cracks.
I saw a contractor do the dynamite burried in bored holes in order to make foundation digging in red shale easier. A decade later the whole development of townhomes looks like a fractured Picasso cubist puzzle. What a mess. It just takes time to arrive.
Stonewall, Colo.
When I was twelve my folks wanted to add to the basement under our house. We used a wheel barrow and a hand shovel. Wih me driving my brother’s Ford coupe, we could load the wheel barrow twice as full, ease it up the incline, I did have to avoid driving into/over the row of rhubarb directly in fron of the opening.
I don’t remember how long it took, but it was good when done. And I certainly knew how to use a clutch when we finished.
Yeah, I know all that stuff, if I wanted to run it I would. I live out in the sticks, no need to alert inspectors.
I’d use one of those small 36” units.
Well.., if it was simply like that, he should have just put a door in it... LOL...
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