Russ, Bill, Matt, Bruce, and Dee muscle the tunnel into place one section at a time
The Redwood Canyon Tunnel was moved from storage to its home today. This move has been has been long anticipated. It was almost anti-climatic to see the sections slip into place according to Bill and Bruce’s plan.
A large team focused on safely lifting, transporting, moving, aligning, and surveying the tunnel from storage to its new home. The high temperatures made it a long and tough work day.
The saga of weekend tunnel welding as told to Bob by Bruce:
We started at sunrise; Brandon tried 3 types of rod as Bill said stick is stronger, problem was one of dissimilar materials, the channel is very thick, the attaching material is thin angle iron for lagging the wood. How to blow holes through metal 101…
Brandon worked and worked, vertical welding is hard no matter what method you use. Voltage settings, rods type; at least the fan was keeping him cool (sort of).
Switched to MIG, Mitchell ground all the joints for MIG, then the fan blew away the gas so we had to run Brandon a little hotter, the result is a great bunch of welds. Mitchell had some suggestions, and the two of them got going so fast Kevin Hayashi and Bruce couldn’t move and clamp the parts together fast enough. The welding project was all done before lunch.
After that Kevin and I leveled and graded the tunnel as best we could. The slight variations in steel height limited our attempt to level all sections, but it is within an inch of perfect everywhere. We had better luck than a couple of bridges in recent memory:)
There were a few tiny flaws, like a missing foot plate and a piece of C channel in backwards. Nothing that a thick plate of steel couldn’t rectify.
The plan is concrete on Thursday. Mike is working on a wood plan, I doubt we’ll be putting any dirt against walls before the tractor goes away on the 27th. No worries, I got ditches to dig and pipes to install.
Many thanks to Brandon, Mitchell, Kevin, & Bruce
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