building a Retaining Wall: Day 4

This morning when we arrived at the worksite and it was back to the retaining wall as the lumber had arrived.

Mike is excited as the Country Lumber delivery truck is here at 8am this morning. (After getting a little lost)

A lift of 10' and 12' 6x6 beams is a beautiful sight. You can see a lift with some 8' as well, they will be mostly for the returns and the dead men. (More on those later)

Instead of moving the pile to the saw we decided to move the saw to the pile, much easier on the back this way.

The angled cuts are looking good, seems to be 62 degrees. All the overlapping pieces are nailed together with 10" nails.

In order to make sure all the holes line up from row to row we measure the location before putting the new piece down. Then we simply transfer the marks and drill the new piece once its in place. 

We have left the insulation covering the fresh concrete a few days now and it seams to have really hardened up. With 4 rows on this section its only gonna take on more piece before we reach the height that the blaster will need to drill the dowel holes.

On the 5th row we added what we call a dead man piece. It will stretch back under the dirt and be drilled and doweled back to the bead rock to stop the forces from the backfill pushing near the top of the wall.

This piece must be very well fastened to the wall because there will be a lot of sideways pressure near the middle and top of the wall. I am drilling pilot holes for the nails which will fasten the dead man to the wall.

Some of the beams have been left long and we will trim and clean them up later with a chainsaw power planer combo.

Here is the nailing pattern that we used for the dead man. It will also be very well nailed to the piece above it. 

"LARGE BIRD" Ian yelled. Your not the only ones interested in our project. This bald eagle is watching us work. There is a video of it on YouTube if you would like to check it out... Eagle Video

The end of the dead man beam will be drilled and doweled just as the rest of the wall. Care must be taken not to drill to deep when the piece is over bedrock. Hitting the the rock would damage the costly drill bit.