We might be Losing Money on this one.... #1/4

all right good morning guys and gales new day new site and this is one doozy of a site in fact if i would have known what we were getting into when we first started i would have definitely bid things differently [Music] so we're going out to re remove and replace a timber retaining wall yeah that's a little messed up so the wall has started to rot in a few select areas and that's one of the downfalls of timber retaining wells otherwise the top is true and straight as can be if the wall had started rotting you're not gonna get too far with that no man i don't either nobody likes this thing listen that we sound so spoiled [Music] but look at this timber retaining wall right now do you see all them dead men in there the company that built this over built it and knew what they were getting into we do have engineering on this but our engineering isn't going to account for the unforeseen problems what we got we're gonna start demoing what we can and uh hopefully we get that daewoo out here kind of sooner than later because that would be a whole lot easier so the first thing that we're going to do is just get the old timber retaining wall out there while we're waiting for the daewoo to come out we just take the volvo and just start demolishing it i mean i wanted to talk to you real briefly though about those tires those tires are we call them a brick yard tire it's really designed to stay on a hard surface this is not a tire for landscaping work or any type of off-road work because there's no air in the tire and there's no cush to the tire and that means you get no traction to the tire this is great if you're going to be running over nails or tearing up concrete or doing something like that because you'll never get a flat but you'll never get any traction and it's also hard on the operators so you've if you've ever watched like those off-road shows where they've got you know off-road vehicles they always got big fat tires right and the reason that is is when they go off-roading they actually air them down and the more rubber they have on the ground the better the traction right well with solid tires you don't have that as an option so in the beginning of this job we actually try to keep the site clean this is just futile so even though it looks like it's got an aggressive lug pattern you're making it you're pushing this outside of its typical comfort zone if there was air we'd air the tires down a little bit and then that lug pattern would actually grab and bite [Applause] so what blaine is hitting as a secondary dead man so the dead men go look at those tires just spinning just spinning so the dead men go into the hill this is the face the dead men go behind it and then there's another dead man behind that that's what he's showing right now and that's how they stitch this together and whoever this company was that built this wall kudos to you man i love seeing jobs well built if this wall hadn't rotted out it wasn't gonna go anywhere it's just the fact that they use timbers and here's a really interesting fact about timbers and the reason why i don't use them is they have a light diablo blades baby cut that spike right in half those suckers can't be beat or you could have moved the saw blade over just a hair and not cut a spike right in half and save that much more blade um but here's an interesting fact about timbers we got a little bit of a problem oh not problem but this last timber down here the parking lot is poured over so here's the interesting fact about timbers they have a lifetime warranty on them until you cut them or drive a spike into them so how do you make them stick together how do you build anything with them it's just a gimmick when they when the manufacturers actually told me that and i actually said that to them they just kind of smile and i just kind of said i'm never using timbers again although in certain situations where you're okay with the wall degrading after anywhere from 10 to 25 years because that's a typical lifespan of them they can be a viable option because they're so good at bridging and that's exactly what this company did is they bridged that's why they use timbers in here because where we're digging right now the big is the beginning of the problems we're going to it gets way worse behind us and this is going to be part of this series we have to keep changing our plan to compensate for the soils that we have underneath there oh another question that people have asked is why don't you take the cmp off well because it's kind of a pain in the butt to take it off put it on take it off put it on and we're grabbing a lot of timbers and then we're doing a little bit of digging and pretty soon you get so comfortable just digging with that grapple that you don't care it's just like you just angle it a little different scoop it's like a different set of skills but once you got them you just flow with it and it's the the ratio of demolition to excavation is such that the slight inefficiency with the digging with the the grapple is no big deal okay one thing i would like to see them do before we did do this but what i'd like to see them do in the beginning is a saw cut on that asphalt that way if there's a tear it doesn't go too far um it looks like it's under the parking lot and it's in the class five in the parking lot so it's filling up the hole i don't know how much is under there yeah i mean i'm walking on but it's pretty firm underneath the water it's just i think all that class 5 underneath the asphalt i think is saturated and coming in from there but it seems pretty solid under the water but i don't know how deep you have to go to if there can be water in the rock under the wall yeah i don't know how deep you need to go all right so while we're waiting for our blocks and drain tiles to get dropped off we're gonna go through the pig and get it all greased up with my most favorite grease gun in the world so here's kind of a cool thing that we learned after the job was all done the property manager came out and told us that they'd had so many water problems in this area that they have to drill holes in the parking lot because they get water blisters god dang it all right in true volvo fashion the damn thing is not starting now i need my wrenches that stupid that stupid ground is loose it looks like there's a bunch of water in there too so shut that electric off take that off dry it off hook it up and then maybe it'll start and there is all of our block of course so he was telling us that there were they have to drill holes in the parking lot to release the water from beneath the lot because they get blisters in the parking lot sam looks frustrated i'll bet ya i'll bet you that terminal strip because we keep having to tighten this thing down anymore i think it's the thing on top of the battery yeah so we might have to go get that asb yeah see the apostrophe starts flashing and then it does the engine warm end engine stop there's oil in it right yep all right guys well the volvo is dead in the water we're not super hopeful we got tech coming out and uh yeah and it is now starting to rain good lord [Laughter] i'm sorry i'm laughing at sam's pain but if you guys work in our industry you guys how many times have you been there you know what you know that feeling it's just one thing after another you're trying to get ahead and it seems like everything fights you i mean the job site is fighting us the machinery is fighting us so we lost just under two and a half hours because of that volvo nonsense so that ends up being almost seven and a half with the three of us i actually kind of think that's pretty awesome that my guys are taking the time to calculate what it actually cost the company and lost time while they're watching and seeing these delays it's not good that we have those problems but it's good that i actually have guys that are thinking along those lines that's kind of awesome i got it i got great guys man i love my team blaine is that's blaine running the asv never seen that dude get mad never never i don't understand it and i mean he's been in spots where he should get mad so i don't like unloading trucks i mean oh this is cool look at how he can reach across the truck and unload from the other side i mean not all skid loaders can do that now most skid voters can but it's that's not something that you should take for granted right but i don't like unloading trucks because it just takes time okay we finally got the truck unloaded look at all these blocks now the million dollar question is gonna be where are we gonna put them on [Music] man block has been hard to get this year oh they are out oh so we found out that there's been so much water this is not normal right here what we're doing we actually had the engineer come out and we actually have to embed a drain tile in front of and below our wall i'll tell you in a minute well here's the plan for today yesterday kind of went to heck what with the volvo breaking down i was getting a little heated about that you know blaine the calmest guy i know was getting irritated about that even so as far as today goes uh we are going to start getting our base blocks in and start building so hopefully we have a nice smooth day today oh here you go we need one of these little guys 35 g i've always been curious to try some john deere stuff [Music] all right we altered our plan a little bit so initially we were just gonna get that chunk that we did yesterday all basted in and good to go and then dig this out base it dig this out base it but blaine wants to excavate the whole run get our step up excavate that out so that we can just base that whole run so if we go back to where we were installing that drain tile that is not below our retaining wall it's actually if our wall is here the face of our wall is here it's in front of it by 12 inches and it's 12 inches below it so we've gotta we've made sure that it wasn't part of the surcharge zone because the blocks when you put a block down it creates pressure but that pressure doesn't go straight below the block that pressure goes out like a triangle and then outside of that triangular zone we put in drain tile so any water coming in would grab it we didn't want to rest the block on the drain tile so it's an important point to differentiate so when you heard sam say we're at a half when we have a taller retaining wall that we fortify with grid we have all these layers of grid and you'll see some grid going in here pretty soon and the grid itself is only about that thick right but when you have seven layers of grid that thick two three four five six seven you can see where now it'll squish down but we always try to compensate for the base of the wall we don't go you know straight you know lev or dead level with them if we know we're going to be putting a lot of grit on the backside and we never run the grid through the face because that's tacky we want to run the grid up close to the face but never through the face and i've seen wall companies that do it through the face and i don't know that's not for me um but so we always compensate with the bubble so we don't go dead level if we've got a lot of grit on it we won't go aggressive like this but you can see if we're kicking you know building the wall we'll compensate for that grip and there's the second drain tile system going in so this has two one you can see down in the lower left corner i believe sticking out and that gets daylighted down to about ah we had to find a spot down the road to go daylight that so that's just sucking up parking lot water and then the the drain tile that's in the wall sucks up the actually should never see that drain tile work to be quite honest with you let me just explain that real quick yes there is drain tile in the wall but this is a mortarless system and what that means is the entire wall is designed to weep so we put in a lot of drainage oh my gosh to make that happen it just started snowing yep that is definitely snow so when i was telling you about the drain tile is you should never actually see that work because we put enough drainage aggregate into the wall to get all the water going alright guys well we are going to call it a day the weather has turned on us it is really snowing it's uh it's kind of turned this site into a muddy muddy mess i'll tell you guys what probably two inches taller than when i got here this morning um so i got everything tarped off we got our big old dirt pile back here tarped so hopefully hopefully with the tarps down we should be able to be out here tomorrow i don't see why not and then today the section that we opened up yesterday uh we got the base blocks in second course is in then the next step after that would be getting a geo grid in and behind our wall here we have to bring it up for the geo grid so that the geo grid will sit you know flat on there and we are not going to be able to do that today because it is really wet back there and you can't pack mud so yeah um yeah that's all i got hopefully we're able to be out here tomorrow nope tomorrow was not gonna happen because that was the start of our first snowstorm of the season and we got eight inches of snow that night and i think you guys some most of you guys have probably seen that video plowing heavy wet cement style snow um and why the reason i'm releasing these out of order is i want to release them all back to back to back so you guys are going to see this entire series come to life from start to finish until we wrap this project up and i'll tell you right now that what you're seeing today was only the very beginning of the problems on this site we've got a lot more going on and it wasn't until after we were completely wrapped up with the job did we find out that the management company knew about all of the water problems on the site that's when they were started to tell us about having to drill holes in the parking lot because they get water blisters about some of the other the multitude of water problems that they were doing and how they were handling it and managing it and when we first looked at the wall you guys did you see how flat level and true that was that thing was really well built but the company that built that over compensated by putting a lot of extra dead men into that wall and they had a drain tile system in below their wall as well and so you know a lot of times when we go in and we do demolition we don't find things well built or we don't know how they built things or why they built things um in this case we saw the drain towel on the front and it was like first thought is a typical rookie mistake put the you know the drain tile in the wrong spot or whatever but it wasn't it was to release the pressure from below the parking lot so they did know about that and after looking at how they built the rest of the wall it was very well done so we've got a busy week ahead of us and then we've got some really cool stuff coming right after that that's our video for today god bless you guys go get em and hopefully we'll see you on another one