In my previous post on this, I showed the building of the retaining wall. This one will be about the rest of the site preparation and the building of the playset itself. Now hauling dirt up the hill and dumping it here sounds pretty straightforward right? Well, it is, but I ran into some snags along the way, so this is why I figured it was enough for a post all by itself. The building of the playset, which we bought used off of Facebook Marketplace, took me all of a few hours, so I'll just tack it on the end here.
What you see above is how far I got on the first day's work. Granted I only had about 6 hours to spare, but I think you get the idea of how much time and effort it requires to move dirt by hand. This is why people are willing to spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on excavation equipment. The 40 horse skiploader I had before our move would move this much dirt in about 10 minutes lol. But, you work with what you've got, and right now all I have is a little lawn tractor dump cart and some hand tools, so this is how it's getting done.
This is where I was mining my dirt from. After we moved in I found an area in the woods where the previous owner dug a hole with his skidsteer loader and dumped a bunch of brush and garbage into the hole. I think his intention was to burn it all and then fill the hole back in with this dirt. I found remnants of other burns in the hole, so that makes the most sense. I've been slowly chipping away at the trash heap with our weekly pick ups, throwing a little in the can at a time. I'm not too keen on the idea of breathing in the toxic smoke from burning household goods made of nasty industrial chemicals. I'm not sure why the previous owner didn't just throw it in the trash like I'm doing. It looks like it's been sitting there for years. This hole in the ground has been a great habitat for rats, snakes and mosquitoes. I'm sure my neighbors appreciate me cleaning it up. The bugs shouldn't be quite as bad this year in the neighborhood with that cesspool gone. Anyway, since I needed a little loose dirt to fill in behind the retaining wall, this soil was just the ticket.
These snake pictures always seem to get a rise out of people, and I think new-to-me wildlife is cool, so here it is. This is what I believe to be a ringneck snake. It's hard to get a sense of the size of snakes in photos sometimes, but this one I'd say is about the size of a pencil. Maybe a bit longer, but about the same thickness. They're nocturnal, but this one was burrowed in the dirt pile, so he came wriggling out of one of my shovels full of soil. I saw one more of these and about 5 worm snakes while digging.
The worm snakes are even tinier than the ringneck. They're just a hair bigger than an earth worm and kind of look like one at first glance. Turns out they dine on earth worms, so the name is quite appropriate. I tried mightily to get some pics of one, but they move fast and I wasn't able to keep one trapped without harming it before it burrowed back into the earth and disappeared. I just let them go rather than harass them. Given their proximity to each other, I would venture a guess that ring neck snakes like to dine on worm snakes.
Okay, back to the moving dirt part. This is the end of the second day of work. It doesn't look like much, but it's probably more fill brought in than the previous day.
I spent about the same amount of time this day and would have probably finished this day, except that I had issues with my brand used dump cart. Even though I heavily beefed up the wheels with steel bearings and real trailer tires as shown in this post, the frame/tongue of the dump cart wasn't up to the task of hauling dirt. They designed it a bit off center with the axle forward of the halfway point on the dump box. This way when it was loaded evenly, the rear-biased weight would allow the dumping action to happen automatically due to a constant upward force on the trigger. Pull the spring loaded trigger and the rear falls.
It probably works fine for leaves and grass clippings, but it proved too light for hauling dirt. While I was hauling one load up the hill into the yard, the added upward pressure on the trailer tongue at the trigger caused the piece of steel channel to bend, the trigger let go, and I lost my whole load of dirt right there. Not fun. I popped it back together, loaded it back in front heavy, and took it the rest of the way to the destination, but something had to be done about this. I took it into the shop and straightened it once, then got a few more loads out of it by loading it only halfway with the load front heavy, but it still failed on the last one of the day, so it had to be beefed up.
Also of concern was the hitch. I made this thing a bit light for the work as well. It bent badly under the weight of the dump cart. I decided to modify this a bit too to make it withstand the load a little better. I guess I didn't realize how much torque this little zero turn mower puts to the ground.
Very serendipidously, the previous owner had burned something that left behind these pieces of heavy gauge channel that happened to be almost the exact dimensions of the piece that bent on the dump cart. The carriage head bolts were removed and some pieces of angle on one end were ground off to make use of one of these pieces.
I was planning initially on grafting two of the heavy channel pieces together to get a full-length replacement out of it, but ultimately decided to cut the existing piece close to the axle so that the new piece could be grafted directly to it without disassembling the axle. I figure that there's not nearly enough strain back in that location to bend that little short piece, so I took the gamble and went this way.
The two pieces were just butted up to each other. It's amazing the coincidence of how dimensionally close the two differently manufactured pieces are to each other.
The little angle pieces that got zipped off with the angle grinder earlier were used to reinforce the grafted butt-joint. I have to admit the welds turned out much better than expected considering how crusty all the pieces were initially. It's hard to get clean welds on something with such heavily pitted rust embedded in. They're not perfect, but they'll hold.
Rather than rebuild the trigger for the dumping mechanism, I just opted to weld the box right to the piece of channel. The hauling function is more important than the dumping function, and I can't have it opening up repeatedly like it was while I'm moving heavy things like dirt. I'm not a big fan of doing twice as much work.
This is what the hitch looked like wen I pulled it off. The metal just above the one gusset was starting to fatigue too, so it was just a matter of time before this piece failed too. Time for a redesign.
This is what I came up with. After straightening it as best I could, I added these little downriggers to create a triangular shape that transfers the force to near the mounting holes. this reduces flex on the structure in between, and would probably be adequate by itself. After these modifications to both the cart aand the hitch, I just mounded the dirt on and it took the weight no problem. Redesign successful.
With the ability to load the cart heavy, the work went a lot faster. I think I added a little bit more after this pic, but it was pretty much done at this point. Time to put up the play structure.
As I said above, the assembly of the structure went very quickly. Here's the main frame of the structure going up. Kristen took these photos for me. I actually had to move it away from the wall quite a bit after that. The plans I downloaded from the internet weren't accurate. Turns out the manufacturer changed the design on these quite a bit over the years.
Henry and Bianca helped out on this part.
Almost Done!
After lunch it was fully assembled. The kids played on it the rest of the day, which made it all worth it. We reverse quarantined ourselves pretty early on due to my wife being pregnant and at high risk for respiratory infections, so going to the park is out of the question. The timing on this structure going up couldn't be any better. I'd like to say I planned it that way, but the opportunity just kind of fell into our laps at the right time it seems. It's been about 2 weeks since I got it assembled and they're out there every day tracking mud back into the house and I couldn't be happier. I'm working on growing grass in the area to solve the mud problem, but that's it for this one. Until next time, keep the Hive buzzing!
