Planning Construction

Your planning has reached a stage where you

  • know what you want to do,
  • have a fairly good idea of your route, your chamber location,
  • have all the permission you need from anyone,
  • have all the volunteers you can get,
  • have some idea of how to pay people.
  • have the duct and the chambers

You have a lot of freedom to run the project your own way. B4RN will be able to advise, but progress is really up to you. You need advice from other volunteers from other areas.

Your next move will depend on what resources you have, and how you will finance anything you don't have.

It will depend how well your volunteers are organised and their abilities. And how well they function as a group.

Once you start moving into the practical side it should be easier to get a cohesive team.

  1. You should have some idea of the method you would prefer to use to get each section done.
  2. You should be aware of how well your project is funded - i.e. whether you can pay money or whether it should be by shares.
  3. You should know if any landowners
  • wish to dig their own section,
  • wish to pay someone and claim the shares themselves
  • insist on X doing the job (or insist that Y doesn't do the job)
  • would be willing to dig someone else's land for shares

4. You should have asked around locally to see if anyone with a digger or tractor is willing to do digging for shares. (As the project progresses people may be more willing to join in as they see what the job entails, so keep asking)

5. This gives you a fair idea of what you may be able to achieve with local resources. If you are adjacent to a B4RN area, then they might have people willing to do work for you for shares.

6. Another way of getting work done for shares would be if you had anyone willing to pay someone to do the work and claim the shares themselves.

Your next consideration is what are your own team of volunteers capable and willing to do. If you have an area with some very time-consuming sections it will be difficult or even unreasonable to get anyone to do this for £1.50 a metre. Any B4RN contractor that comes to do work for you will be working with volunteers on a community project. He is nothing like a paid employee, he becomes part of the team of volunteers himself and will go out of his way to help. In fact he will be the answer to many of your problems. He will certainly be one of the best possible sources of advice.

There is an inequality between B4RN groups here. Some groups seem to just dump the whole job on a contractor and do not help. Other groups throw themselves into it and do all the difficult bits and then support the contractors throughout. This is how it is. Some areas have just not got the personnel or the ability. Do your best for your area. Focus on achieving your result in the best way you can.

You will end up with

  1. Some tricky bits (like getting under walls for example) that your volunteers intend to do
  2. Some bits you can get done for shares by local people
  3. Sections that have to be done by a contractor

The proportions will vary greatly between different B4RN groups. And this really all about your first Sectors of your whole area. Things will change.

If you happened to have an area consisting of large soil rich fields that could be moleploughed then it should be easy to find people willing to do work. At £1.50 a metre it would be possible to earn enough in a day to buy a brand new moleplough attachment. (Buy your own?)

If you were selective about your digger sections (longish sections, not too far apart) then you could get 120 to 140 metres dug. A digger-man might expect £200 for a day's work, so this is about the going rate. But if you can add in a chamber or two into the job, then suddenly it's more attractive.

You need to concentrate on the bits that can't be moleploughed. It might be able to do these using volunteers or make up a package of work that includes tricky bits plus some ploughing.

In terms of contractors, you can just ask B4RN to find you one. This may not be your quickest way of getting things done. If you know any of the existing contractors, or know anyone that does, you can approach them direct, they are 'approved B4RN contractors' , but they are self-employed and can choose where to do work.

Note B4RN ducting and fibre can share a trench with electricity, water, whatever. Keep alert for people that might be laying a trench for other reasons and you could put your duct in there at the same time. In fact someone may be able to gain £1.50 per metre for a trench they were digging anyway. Similarly, listen out for people who might be getting their drives tarmacked, their gardens landscaped, etc.

We have a car-parking area shared by about 10 cars, they are trying to organise it to be resurfaced. If we can join in with their scheme and put ducting in the ground then we can get them an extra few hundred pounds and we can eliminate a lot of the hassle of the people politics.

Your ideal would be to have something like a digger, a moleplough, and a quad bike all there at once and about 6 experienced people with one clear plan. That sounds too good to be true, but after about two years of trying we did get to that level a couple of times.

It's difficult to give useful guidelines because areas will be wildly different in the personnel that happen to be among your volunteers. Maybe a few real examples will help.

Example: Newby Head 2018

A farmer who owned a digger and a moleplough, aided by 3 experienced volunteers. doing over 1000 metres of roughish moorland in a day. Quadbike as well. Working the whole team along the route, switching from digger to plough as necessary.

Problems - not quite enough people. Difficult to lay out the ducting ahead over rough grass. 3 machines that had to be moved down the line, and only the farmer knew how to drive them.

Had to plan to have various tools, joints, food, water with us. Had to arrange transport back. Some small sections had to be left to be sorted later.

Very successful, but a tough day.

Example: Barbondale 2016 One Long Sector -- Core route to Dent - about 10 km

  • DAY 1 to DAY 3 Farmer A agrees to dig a 200m field for shares (could have been moleploughed in hindsight), 3 volunteers helping
  • volunteers get under the 5 walls, 3 streams 2 bridges, 1 hedge along the whole sector route
  • volunteers find out about water pipes and dig down to phone lines along the route
  • DAY 16 Next field (300 metres) moleploughed and a bit of digger work by Farmer A, 1 volunteer helping
  • DAY 59 to DAY 65 Outside Contractor does 1300 metres of main line across about 10 fields plus several spur lines (3 man contractor team, 1 volunteer helping)
  • DAY 78 to DAY 85 Contractor returns - 7000 metres of verge (3 men + 1 volunteer)
  • DAY 88 Final field completed (had to wait for grass to be cropped) Local contractor moleploughing (and a little digging) for shares - not keen on shares but managed to include another separate section of digging on condition volunteers did the backfilling. (3 men plus 1 volunteer)

Notes - Absolutely clueless and unorganised village group. Helped out by B4RN who arranged the contractor.

Example: 700 metres of Core, as it happened

DAY 1 Section 1 moleploughed by A, Section 2 dug with a tractor by the landowner B

DAY 5 Section 3 digger C

DAY 8 Section 8 moleploughed by A

DAY 40 Section 7 stream crossing by volunteers

DAY 55 Section 9 digger C

DAY 56 Section 10 digger by landowner A

DAY 62 Section 4 moleploughed by A Section 5 digger C

DAY 64 Section 6 moleploughed by A

Two months to do 700 metres

The system we were using was to call in a local man to do all the moleploughing for shares and for a volunteer (who claimed the shares) to hire a diggerman to do the digging sections. There were 3 walls and 2 stream crossings along the route which were done by volunteers. There were 4 tracks to cross, three of these were dug across and one was cut with an angle grinder. A slightly complicated section at point '2' was sorted by the farmer there. A very complicated bit at point '9' took a lot of planning and co-operation from a group of six houses. There were 2 volunteers helping for most of the sections and at that group of houses about 6 people helped.

Why did it take 2 months? Mainly because the group of volunteers were completely unorganised. Other sections in this region were doing better, but there was no co-ordination. There had never been any town meetings to gather volunteers, there was virtually no publicity. It got better.

Teamwork

Digger is doing one section at the same time as the plough is setting off to do an easier field.

Here a digger takes over when the plough can't proceed.

A digger either side of the stream made short work of this crossing

Here a few rocks are removed and the ploughing can continue without even a join.

Here, it was set up to begin moleploughing away from the fence, but there were too many roots and so a digger was called in to work back to more suitable ground.

This was back in the 'no joins at any cost' regime that we had in our early days. The moleplough attachment is there threaded on to the duct ready to be attached to the tractor when ploughing begins.

All the duct had previously been fed underneath that blue water pipe and the fence.

Two diggers. The near one is backfilling. There are 3 volunteers doing the 'putting the nice bits in to cover the duct' bit. While another digger is digging the trench.

Having a well-organised team can really make things flow fast. That section looks as though it would have moleploughed well, but if you happen to have 2 diggers, then crack on. It seems as though lots of farmers have diggers but not often a moleplough attachment. A moleplough attachment would pay for itself after the first 1000 metres.

Michaelston y Fedw are a B4RN type organisation in South Wales. The terrain is more Norfolk than Lancashire. (seyydliad math B4RN yn Ne Cymru. Mae'r tir fwy Norfolk na Lancashire)

They have a good working system. They use a trencher (bloody great chain-saw attachment on a tractor), a tractor for laying out and a digger for backfilling. These three machines work together at the same time. They use a trencher because a standard moleplough can't get deep enough in land with crops. Because of farming practices they also have to try to go round the edges of the fields.

Trencher at the end of its run

Tractor laying out.

Digger (slightly delayed as it mends a water pipe), Trencher appears to have not bothered waiting and continued on a better line.

Other drone pictures from Michaelston y Fedw

When to dig / When to plough

The sort of scruffy area that has surface rocks and roots is a prime candidate for a digger

This is almost total rocks. Although the surface looks fairly reasonable, you might have been tempted to plough this and soon given up

A short section between a chamber and a stream, while you are there to dig the chamber, you may as well dig to the stream

A perfect field for ploughing. But the farmer insists on digging it. So it gets dug. Some farmers are worried about their land drains being damaged by the plough. When you dig, you make sure they are all ok, and repair if you hit any. You can also thread the duct under drains if you do come across them.

Cautley There is some great stuff in this video. You may want to pause it a few times.

  • Bridge crossing by using ladders in the river, tacking black duct to the side
  • Steve Foster's new plough - which is carrying twin core duct, that's a very heavy drum. He has duct guides either side of his cab
  • Some tractor ploughing. Here the drum is rotating forwards down into the feeder tube, so you can't really help feed it manually. Be interesting to know how that worked.
  • A risk assessment provided by the Woodland Trust (caution - trees).
  • A bridge where they just used a digger straight across. And had 2 diggers going at once
  • Cutting through a concrete track.

And the Welsh group at Michaelston-y-Fedw, who are not a B4RN group, but inspired by B4RN, but just got themselves organised and worked everything out for themselves.