Quote:
Originally Posted by AC_Hacker
Even from up here in Oregon, I can hear the pounding of hammers, the whine of metal saws and the hiss of arc welders in garage shops all over the Dallas / Fort Worth area, as enraged Texans are planning their revenge to prove you wrong.
Don't ever tell a Texan that something isn't even an option...the very idea!
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So thats where all that noise was coming from that kept me up last night!
You're quite right, I should have known better! I'm sure you've seen (or heard of) the bumper sticker "I wasn't born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could"; I guess I didn't get here soon enough and missed that memo.
I should have remembered there are exceptions to every rule, so please, allow me to try and dig myself out of the hole I'm in (or is that dig myself into a hole, since I said the hole can't be dug...
) What I meant to say, of course
, was it wouldn't be practical in that it would take a loooong time for little progress. Therefore, unless one wasn't able to find work (or really wanted the experience, aka is a masochist
), one would be time and money ahead by paying a professional to drill and working a job during the time it would have taken to diy drill through the rock.
While I am a big proponent of diy and learning new things, I also know professionals have their place as well. I suppose it's the old "do it Fast, do it Cheap, do it Good: pick 2" conundrum. I'll usually pick cheap and good, but when contemplating drilling through rock, fast looks pretty appealing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AC_Hacker
Please note that the force of the barb is not enough to withstand pressurized air. We found out the hard way. Ken was worried that he might have a swollen nose from the incident...
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Oooh, projectiles!
I assume you're pressurizing from an air compressor? We filled the pipe with water first to speed up the pressurizing: less air to compress. Probably not a problem for you since you won't have as much air volume inside your pipe. Also, since we pressure tested a zone at a time we couldn't leak test in water, but having water exiting the pipe through the holes helped identify the problem areas: and like you were saying, when they leaked they weren't just dripping!
The engineer wanted us to pressurize to about 100psi and make sure after 30min there wasn't a loss of more than 2-3psi. Some pressure change is likely, due to changing temperatures. Apparently the pipe expands more than the water will for a given temperature change, so the pressure inside goes down as the pipe heats up.
On trusting gauges, we had some dial gauges that look very similar. On one of them the card with the pressure markings had warped on one side: therefore from perhaps 60-140psi the needle dragged against the card and gave inaccurate readings. That threw us off for a while: we would hook up the compressor, and it would eventually shut off when it got to 110 or so (it's max pressure), but the gauge only said 90ish. We couldn't figure out why the compressor was shutting off well before its maximum pressure
.