What does your day look like?

pink poodle

気が狂っている男
My day was fucking epic! All thanks to the very kind @steve jobs' pancreas! We hooked up at Hornsby for a few laps of the dirt and a banh mi, then he was kind enough to drive us out to Bare Creek. Holy shit that place was fun!!! Andd the crowds!!! Fucking hell. The jumps lines are super fun (I only hit the various blueish lines) to ride.

In the afternoon the sun powers down in your face pretty hard though, so get in early. I think I'm sunburnt.


Thanks Mr pancreas.

Those stairs look very nice. Good to see them finished
 
My day was fucking epic! All thanks to the very kind @steve jobs' pancreas! We hooked up at Hornsby for a few laps of the dirt and a banh mi, then he was kind enough to drive us out to Bare Creek. Holy shit that place was fun!!! Andd the crowds!!! Fucking hell. The jumps lines are super fun (I only hit the various blueish lines) to ride.

In the afternoon the sun powers down in your face pretty hard though, so get in early. I think I'm sunburnt.


Thanks Mr pancreas.

Those stairs look very nice. Good to see them finished
No probs Monsieur Poodle, we must do again, I had heaps o fun. Hope the Brazza was good.

Ps your new ride is very purty.
 

slowmick

38-39"
Took the bike to Lysterfield this morning and got all excited. There were no cars at the end of Hallam North Road and I drove up to the car park I could see free spots. Then I saw the gate was open and manned by Volunteers. Planko the Golden Goat and all of his friends were out for a day of racing. Felt a bit silly so I drove around to the front gate. Very quiet on the far side of the park and not rain to speak of. Fat, unfit and tired is no way to hit Follow Me. Gave up after an hour and went home to head out for three hours doing slides at an indoor play centre with my daughter followed by chores. Will sleep well tonight.
 

Chriso_29er

Likes Bikes and Dirt
Took the bike to Lysterfield this morning and got all excited. There were no cars at the end of Hallam North Road and I drove up to the car park I could see free spots. Then I saw the gate was open and manned by Volunteers. Planko the Golden Goat and all of his friends were out for a day of racing. Felt a bit silly so I drove around to the front gate. Very quiet on the far side of the park and not rain to speak of. Fat, unfit and tired is no way to hit Follow Me. Gave up after an hour and went home to head out for three hours doing slides at an indoor play centre with my daughter followed by chores. Will sleep well tonight.
I loved those play centres when my kids were younger, there is one in Ringwood I think it was that had a slide that was vertical. I just had to have a go myself, supervising the kids of course lol.
 

Dales Cannon

lightbrain about 4pm
Staff member
Hifi has been posting some of his superb landscaping and building works so I thought I would post some of my most recent project. No slide but still too much manual labour for me...

We have had our fire pit for about 15 years. It is part of a pressure vessel from an extinct power station, it is about 1200mm in diameter. Initially it was just sitting on the grass then after I mentioned I was going to make an area around it out of excess house bricks #1 dug a squarish hole with the tractor and sunk the pit in the ground trimmed by something like two dozen bricks. As he was only 14 or 15 at the time it was left as it was. Sadly it was a pain to mow around and the ground was fairly uneven making for some scary drunken moments around the blazing fire and being self unemployed it was time to do something different. So I spent some time over roughly the last 2 weeks to make this:




BUT!!!! When it was finished I realised I didn’t have any wood to burn so that meant it was a waste of time and there was no choice so out it came.
As some are daunted by such an undertaking I thought I would document the whole removal process for you.
There are a couple of bits which are tricky and I will explain these as I go, the tractor was very handy even with a worn out hydraulic control valve which means the bucket falls open under its own weight let alone if anything is in the bucket. Driving around is interesting...
Step one was removing the sand that was put between the bricks, this is just a medium river sand because the pavers used were double height tumbled bricks with big gaps. The recovered sand can be spread out on the grass to level that in various places. I expected this to be one of the hard parts but using the DCSU (Dales Cannon Sucker Upperer, patent applied for) the sand came out easily:
Next was removing the sand and dirt around the paving and the tractor did a great job. Then the haunching had to came off. This was the second tricky part. Set concrete can be hard to break up but I used the usual brand of concrete softener and waited the requisite 30 minutes before putting it in the unmixer.

As you can see it takes the concrete back to an unset phase and it isn’t expensive, in fact a little goes a long way. Make sure you actually remove it after using otherwise the stuff goes off like concrete.

The unmixer was my third and biggest problem. In the past I had done this with 3 phase mixers and all you have to do is swap the white and blue wires but with a 240V mixer and no VFD I was not sure how to proceed. Luckily, guided by youtube, I found the right length flat belt and running that in a figure 8 solved the problem and the concrete unmixed beautifully. There is another method if you are thinking you might have to remove the concrete and that is to add a sachet of sugar to each mix (seriously don’t do this). That way even a year later you can scrape up the concrete and remove it (Don't do this even as a joke). Naturally the unmixed concrete can be sorted into its component parts or gravel, sand and cement. While the sand and gravel can be reused the cement is spent and now useless and I will grind this up very very fine and sell it to drug dealers.
This exposed the outer ring of bricks:

Next job was taking away the outer layer of bricks:

After this more unmixing…
Again a good result from the Huggies brand softener:

Because the FEL on the tractor was a bit wonky with the worn control valve I decided to use stabilised sand when I laid the bricks rather than compact the river sand as usual. Again an application of softener and the stabilised sand was easily removed:

That brought me to the last section of stabilised sand to remove:

A little more work and the inner section of the pit was revealed. This was easily removed with the tractor:

Some further earthworks and the ground was completely restored:
 
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Dales Cannon

lightbrain about 4pm
Staff member
Your firepit will rust out in the next 113 years, mine won't. Pic of the dog... House next door is under construction with usual numbers of trades etc. This morning I went down to the pit (bit of overnight rain). My chocolate Burmese came down too. He dug a hole in the sand pile, for the purposes of abluting, and quickly disappeared from view. I said faaark, how big a shit are you planning and heard chuckles from the builders.
 
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