Who else likes rocks?

Kodiak · Jul 2, 2002

Yaouk:

"Some are the size of a large house. I've always thought about burrowing into one and making a single rock house!"

"The Flintstones oh the Flintstones, their just a simple stoneage family. From the town of Bedrock, just a place right out of history."

I'm sorry I just couldn't resist that. /w3tcompact/icons/clever.gif/w3tcompact/icons/grin.gif/w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif/w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif/w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif/w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif

yaouk · Jul 2, 2002

I've been obscured by the rocks

Kodiak · Jul 2, 2002

Yaouk:

Hey I love that emoticon for your signature. Been there, done that!

yaouk · Jul 2, 2002

Thats ok.
I'm hangin' out to find a million year old fossil inside a rock so I can sell it and holler' yabbadabadoo...

karmakanic · Jul 2, 2002

Don,

I read your posts about the troubles you're having putting that fence in, and I feel your pain. When you're measuring your progress in inches per hour,,,man, that's a bummer. I can see why you'd be a little cross-ways with rocks in general. But hey, I'm willing to help. Just put the ornery critters on a truck and ship'em to the Dave & Linda home for unwanted rocks. We'll give'em a good home. Especially some of those nice retangular ones. All of ours are mostly round and don't take to stacking too well. I've got a real urge for one of of those stacked stone walls like you've got.

Dave

karmakanic · Jul 2, 2002

yaounk

You guys in oz get a real kick out of showing up us Texans doncha' you? *G*

A while back I posted a pic on a bulldozer site of one of my dozers buried to the top of the tracks in a mud hole, and an Oz guy promply posted a pic of his dozer buried to the top of the cab.

I think the thing is, there's only a few places on earth less hospitable to civilized life then Texas, and Oz is one of'em.

Gotta make us some kind of kindred souls, doncha think?

Dave

bgott · Jul 3, 2002

"Any rock breaking suggestions for me, or do i have rocks in my head? "

Dynamite

Hans · Jul 3, 2002

Centex,

How many hundred snake do you figure live in that wall?

karmakanic · Jul 3, 2002

wroughtn_harv,

Nobody gonna pass caliche off on me, I hate the stuff. Too white, and too dusty. Everyone around here uses it for roads, and you've got to pay a pretty good price for it, since it's trucked in. I've got a driveway and a parking lot I need to cover, but I'm holding out for some railroad rock, the stuff the railroad removes when they're redoing the rail bed. It's kinda "dirty". But at least it's brown and doesn't melt when it rains, or turn your car fenders white when it dries out.

A lot of those flint rocks have little pock mark holes formed by mother nature, and some are already sprouting grass and weeds. You're right, it doesn't take much to sustain some plants, usually the ones we don't want.

Dave

ronjhall · Jul 3, 2002

Any rock breaking suggestions for me, or do I have rocks in my head?

Yaouk
Is seen an episode on This Old House where they were splitting large rocks. A Hammer Drill with a ¾” bit was used to drill holes in a line every 8 to 10”. Then sets of steel wedges were driven into each hole. A one handed sledgehammer (about 2 lbs.) was used to hit the wedges until the rock split. They were splitting rocks that were 4 to 5’ a crossed and 3' thick.
After I wrote all the weight and measurements above it occurred to me that in Australia you might be using metric measurements. <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.joshmadison.com/software/convert/>Here is a great free software download for converting measurements.</A>

Von · Jul 3, 2002

Dave, Around my house you can't dig a hole without hitting at least one good size rock! Most are small, but some are the size of VW's. Here is a photo of a rock retaining wall that we made for my wife's flowers. The large one in front is about 3 ft. in diameter. My tractor can't handle anything bigger than that. The hedge rows are loaded with rock walls all around here. The farmers of yesteryear would pile them up when planting the fields. So next time you are up this way stop in, I'll give you all the rocks you will ever want!/w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

yaouk · Jul 3, 2002

Ahh yes. Kindred souls we are.
But Texas more hospitable than Oz?
Can't go swimmin here cause of the White pointer sharks and blue-bottle jellyfish. Can't go for a walk in the scrub without a taipan, or death-adder thretenin' your life.
Can't buy anything cause the Oz dollar is worth only 57 US cents.
(and its still better than England!)

yaouk · Jul 3, 2002

Thanks for that.
I tried this technique once but instead of drilling holes I cut into the rock with a diamond blade. It didin't work, I think, cause I did not cut deep enough and the kerf was not wide enough. But I think I might try it again with the drill technique.

centex · Jul 3, 2002

I would hate to guess how many snakes are in those rocks but it is more than a few. My wife won't go near it. I had to move some rocks from a big pile (20'x20'x5'tall) and I got a 4' snake on the first load. It was a garter snake though and I hated that it was killed. The whole place looks snakey but I have not seen too many this year. It has been to hot and dry until this week. We got more rain in the last 5 days than we got for the previous 6 months of the year. The creek was out of it's banks this morning.

centex · Jul 3, 2002

Dave,

If I shipped you all my rocks all I would be left with is a big hole in the ground...Hmmm, that might not be so bad since what I really wanted was a lake anyway. Unfortunately, I missed the rain to fill it up. We got our years worth this week. Probably won't see much more for a long, long time.

Don

karmakanic · Jul 3, 2002

yaouk,,,

sorry,,,

please excuse the convulated phrasing in my other post.
What we have here, as someone famous said, is a failure to communicate. I wanted the word hospitable to mean warmly receive someone or something,,,oz is less hospitable to civilized life then Texas, therefore it's more dangerous and untamed.

My hat's off to you guys down under, some of your critters and your terrain are definetly nasty.

Dave

yaouk · Jul 4, 2002

Ohhhh. As someone famous also said...DOH!!!
Same language, differrent words.

bellweather · Jul 5, 2002

hazmat
The class was given at the Berkshire Botanical Gardens in Stockbridge. They have one each spring and another in the fall.

hazmat · Jul 5, 2002

Thanks Bellweather.

radman · Jul 5, 2002

I can relate to your rock story. I live in an area with very few good sized rocks. Here people will pay 50 cents/lb for nice 200-300 lb landscaping rocks. It seems like many other things in life, - if you don't have it, then you want it. If you have a lot of it, then you can't give it away. I know of one local trucker who drives his semi truck 400 miles to get rocks and says he can't get enough. He says he has hauled as big as a 30,000 lb rock before.