Pipeline – burnout 2011.05.01

Saturday, 30 April 2011

Did the runaround yesterday to find high pressure glue for the the join and also had the bright idea to put a shackle around the thin pipe and try and pull it out with the car so we set off with high hopes to tie up a whole lot of loose ends today including rolling out a few more sections of pipe so by the end of the day we could see water flowing out of the pipe at the far end of the N2. As it turned out it was nothing but disappointments.

Rob had promised to help us and Neil had promised to bring the pipe, neither materialized.

We managed to get the shackle around the pipe:

and off I went, low range and bang, the pipe snapped and the shackle whizzed by the car at great speed, so lucky it missed the car, so we gave that up as a bad idea. We managed to gain another 12m though by cutting the pipe completely and pulling the thin one out.

We phoned Neil to find out if he was still coming and learned that he had not managed to get more pipe but would come out and fix the pinhole leaks by the shack so we decided it would be a good idea to replace the join so we could test again by checking the meter.

After a long delay we finally got to do that and same result as yesterday, apparently I had spread the glue too thin or the pressure too great and it was still leaking in the same place. took it off again, went back to Reserve to at least push the pipe through the 12m section but, because it was not washed out it got stuck.

So, after lots of running around, lots of frustration and motivation at an all time low we decided to high tail it home.