Hey guys,
So today we went to Hoopston Illinois and did a little road widening for the city, looks like they are giving the north side of town a little face lift. Much needed to if you ask me:) But anyways we changed out three poles, was going to be a four pole job but one was actually marked okay and we might change out later on if our engineer finds it a must need to change. The first pole we changed was a simple pole with a DD light on it with two services attached. Nothing much, but most of our street light poles are 35 foot poles class 5. Also, I should mention that I noticed the pictures that I posted on here yesterday very TINY, probably since I took them with my phone while at work and I'll try and bring my digital camera with me as much as I can but for now the pic's are probably going to be small since I don't want to slow the crew down or get in trouble;)
And our second stop was for a lift pole, a lift pole is when the service to your house needs to be lifted up to either clear the road or b/c the distance from the transformer pole to your house is to far and would cause a great deal of sag in the wire. Ameren has a pretty good policy about keeping our services that are over roadways up at least 18 feet in the air to keep any passing trucks from snagging them. Every year we replace 5-6 poles b/c some farmer got a new piece of equipment that is HUGE and rips down the service along with the pole. You'd be surprised the amount of damage the farmers do to power lines and poles. Not knocking farmers, just trying to give some credit to the lineman when credit is do:)
The third and final pole was by far the hardest one. We had two primary phases that were dead ended on a 40 foot class five pole. The primary wire was 1/0 aluminum, and the neutral was the same size, which was also dead ended. This pole required a dead end arm which is made of fiberglass, anytime that a pole has two or more phases and it's the end of the line, the pole is going to require a fiber-arm, or a "fat arm" and that's just more or less for your protection ~ you will also find these at any train crossing or distribution that crosses the interstate. So, to dead end the wire we put two fish ~ fiberglass rods that give a little support and also separates the phase from the end of the fiberglass arm. So we will have to fish, then a figure eight washer to connect both female ends of the fish and a poly together which will have a dead end shoe on the end. If anyone is actually reading this, that might not make to much sense but I will try to post a picture later so you can see a fish, poly, and a dead end shoe. Once we have the material in the air and on the arm, we took a strap hoist from the end of the shoe to about four or five feet out on the wire and took tension on the wire in order to un-pin the old shoe and re-pin the new shoe into the poly. Sounds like a lot of work right, well try doing all of this with hot primary wires so we were in our rubber gloves and sleeves and it was close to 75 today ~ lot of sweat and dust from all the road work and farming going on.... This is by far one of the toughest jobs I could ever think of doing let alone that I'm trying to do this. I do like challenges tho, and again I've been trying this for over two years now. I actually caught myself thinking about my first few months today and how I did a lot of standing and wondering and now I pretty much know all the material needed and I try to play a game with myself and see if I can get all the material out and ready before my foreman asks for it ~ not much of a game I know, but lately I've been winning:) haha But seriously, things are going so much smoother now then they were 2 years ago and I'm very pleased with my progress but I should be further along ~ I am a little disappointed in myself for that matter...
Anywho, tomorrow I will be bringing all my gear home with me as I am competing in a lineman rodeo on Friday and Saturday. World Class Lineman Rodeo, or WCLR and local 702 is putting on this rodeo near my home town in southern Illinois. By no means am I the fastest or greatest climber but I do love competition and we'll see how I do. Jen is coming down with me so maybe she'll take a video or two of me doing the hurtman and speed climb and I'll post them. As for tomorrow, I think we will be headed back down to Bismark to continue on the ICC work. I know that we still have about 1o poles to pull and back fill the old holes, we will probably frame up and lay out 5 or 6 more single phase poles as well. But I will let you know more tomorrow.
Im going to end by saying that I know I haven't had may views on my blog and this might not be the most interesting trade to some people, but I do feel as if I'm retaining more of the job by now telling all of you about my day. I'll work on better photos from tomorrow on k.
thanks so much,
hurtman DAN.....
ps, the first fatality of my lineman career happened today.....it was a squirrel that you may have seen in the photos ~I opened my truck door to get my lunch out today and about shit myself when I saw that someone put that dead squirrel on my seat. Kinda funny, but again not trying to hurt any ones feelings in case we might have some animal lovers out there.
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