With the unusual nice weather we’ve been having, we continue to do a few projects.
The guys had been working on it, as usual, before I showed up.
You may recognize our pivot field, disced up, not quite ready for spring planting. That’s fine, because we’re laying a pipeline across it now. It will be buried in due course, but there’s still frost in the ground, so we’re laying the pipe just on top of the ground for now.
We borrowed this pipe trailer, which spins and unreels the black pipe as you drive along. Daniel walks along and cuts the metal “tape” that holds the pipe together. It works really slick, and, yes, I got video that I will use in a future Re-Red movie.
If you’ve ever laid black poly pipe, you know the best day to work with it, is on a hot sunny day. The warmth “relaxes” the pipe and it will lay down straight, not curl up like a disgruntled rattlesnake. Since it was a nice day, but not warm enough, Vernon is encouraging this black snake to relax with a propane flame. If Daniel let go, it’d just roll back up!
Towards the end, it’s better to use a metal pipe to help straighten the plastic pipe. Somehow, propane flame, plastic, and bare hands don’t seem to go together.
We used five rolls of pipe, so each had to be straightened before they were welded to the previous roll.
This “welder” is heated to about 500˚, applied to both ends at once for about 30 seconds. The welder is then pulled off, and the hot ends are stuck together. It works pretty slick, and we were pretty good by the fifth weld!
While we won’t bury the pipeline for a while, we did run water through it and it works! Not bad for an afternoon of work.
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One more aspect of ranch living that most people wouldn’t think about. Very interesting. did you run pressure when you ran water through it? I assume that’s how you would know if the joints were sealed well. Thanks for the lesson in ranching.
this took me way back to my days laying black plastic natural gas lines, our 2 in. & smaller pipe, down to 1/2 in. pipe came in rolls, 3 & 4 in. came in 40 ft. sticks, We couldn’t heat our pipe as we un-rolled it, so it took “2 men & a small boy” as they say, to hold on to the end, but we also buried ours as we went,, Our heating iron was the same, it looks like there is a coupling on the left, with the white tag, & a pipe end on the right, the heated pipe end then will slip in the heated coupling, in later years we switched to yellow pipe & used a machine to “butt weld” the heated pipe ends together- I really enjoyed that work, & couldn’t guess how many feet, or miles, of pipe I helped lay- Oh, the good old days,