Allen Valleys Bank Holiday

The weekend went well 3 of us laid the foundation and installed the chamber on a morning a few days earlier. The only issue we found was lining up the 100mm duct in future we would probably make a timber template to hold it in place and screw that to the timber shuttering. We, well Malcolm, hand mixed the concrete as you will see from the pictures.

Over the 3 days of laying ducting, we had about 30 volunteers helping at different times. We cut turf off with a turf cutter well worth it if you wish to do a quick neat finish. Then we dug it with a mini digger using an 8inch bucket. Everyone worked in teams turfing, lifting turf, mini digging and some tidying up the trench. At the same time, a team measured the duct 11x 16mm and 9 x 7mm spurs for the house's we passed and labelled them up using shink cable wrap.

The hardest job was crossing the access road which separated the cabinet and chamber. This was concrete and it looked as if one concrete road had been laid on another. The 24inch floor saw we hired only cut through half of it and the remainder we tried to remove using a couple of Aldi's electric road breakers but after an hour we had hardly touched it. So to save these poor little machines we phoned our very friendly tool hire company, for them to deliver their largest compressor road hammer. This took a morning to remove and lay in fresh concrete over the purple duct.

All that was then needed was a tidy up and arrange for a telehandler to lower the cabinet in place.

The Dig