Tonight we got the second piling in for BenJen's house. He bought two batches of pilings, and we are putting in the six big ones first; 6-1/2" diameter and 21 feet long. I welded caps on them, and Ben has been jetting down the holes. That's an interesting process, and we are kinda lucky to have just the right situation for it. Vern loaned us his pump, hose, and pipe thingy, and the principle is to just keep pumping water down into the ground until it thaws the permafrost. The pipe has a spray nozzle and a circular plate on the bottom to make sure that the hole thaws out to a certain minimum diameter of about 8". The pump is just a plain ole 5 hp water pump. I dug starter holes a couple of feet deep to get down through the tree roots and stuff, and Ben just stands there for a couple of hours, messing with the pipe as it slowly sinks into the ground. When he got the hole about 14' deep, we picked up the piling (with the bottom plate conveniently welded on) and dropped it in the hole. The first time it was pretty scary, because it weighs maybe 300 pounds, and we had a hard time getting it under control. Ben and I tried it by ourselves for a while, until finally Vern showed up. That did it. Same routine again tonight. Pump down the hole, get Vern, throw the pipe in the hole. Debbie says be sure to say how the water goes "sploosh" out of the hole when the pipe goes down. I messed with the jet rig for a couple minutes, and it's kind of surprising to actually feel that ice down there. It bangs and rings the pipe when you drop it; none of this soft squishy dirt down there...
But--If there is any rock or wood in the dirt, a jet won't get them out. So far, it's all just ice or frozen silt.

After the pipe was down, we filled the hole with gravel, and knocked off for the evening; still a couple hours till "dark", but still, it's after 11 pm.


Here's a note I posted to oldtools a couple days ago about getting ready for logging. I got all three Lewis winches working today.

GGGDB--Gas, gun, grub, dogs, and beer. That's our summer checklist for loading the
boat to go to camp.

This week, though, we are getting tooled up for the spring logging trip.
Fixing the Lewis winches and saws, rounding up all the other junk, fixing up
the boats, trying to recruit help, tying up the loose ends so we can be gone
for a week. We don't know yet if Jake can make it, and it won't be the same
if we have to go without him. Yesterday I painted the hull of my old wooden
boat, so today everyone has been pointing out that I have a certain blue
tinge about me. I finally decided not to flip the boat over for the job, so
I just crawled under it with a paintbrush and a can of Safety Blue Bar-Ox.
Debbie says it (my paint job, not the boat's) reminds her of the Saxons or
some such, who used to paint themselves blue before battles.

The neighbors that I usually borrow tools from are planning logging trips
too, so Buck borrowed my peavey before I could get his, and Vern wanted his
pike pole back. Fortunately, Sidney doesn't know who has his winch now...

The summer housebuilding frenzy is in the pilings and freight stage now.
First thing in the spring, everyone drills and installs the pilings for
their new houses (probably four new houses are going up this year). We live
on permafrost, so the houses need to be a few feet above ground to keep the
ground cold enough to stay frozen. The state of the art for pilings is
steel pipe set about 12 to 15 feet deep in the ground, with a flat cap on
the bottom, and usually some steel rings or teeth welded around the pipe
near the bottom, to sort of anchor them into the ice. They project up a few
feet above the ground, and people cut the pipes off level, weld an anchor
plate on top, then set the house sills on top of the pilings. Anyway,
that's what has been what's going on at my smithy lately--cutting pipe and
steel plates, and welding them together for pilings. We've only had one
small freight barge so far this year, but the first big one should arrive
this week, with fuel, new vehicles, housebuilding supplies, a new supply of
beer, and so on. We get maybe a dozen barges a year to Galena, and they all
need to arrive after the ice goes out on the Yukon, and before the water
gets too low to make it through the critical shoal water at the mouth of the
Tanana River, so the barge season is about 4 months, late May through
mid-September.

After the barges arrive, the attention turns from pilings and logging to
freight transport and storage (picture an entire house kit stacked along the
road in front of your lot) then to construction. This year we are building
Ben and Jen's (son and DIL) new house, and we hope to get the roof on before
snow, so that means that we need to get the pilings and platform done, raft
the logs down and mill them, stack the walls (scribed logs with dovetail
corner joints), and frame the roof by about October. Just thinking about it
is making me type faster. Gotta go do my day job today, before I get to
work. I still need to get the kicker back on that boat and load it with
tools, not forgetting the GGGDB, of course .

Better go,

Phil Koontz
Galena, Alaska, where the daylight is 20 hours 25 minutes today,
and gaining over 8 minutes per day.