Having written about the piling installation for the boat house in the previous blog, now its time to focus on the dock and the piling preparation. Since pilings are so hard and expensive to put in, dad came up with the idea to build a cantilevered dock on the canal side of the boat house. This in effect saved putting in 4 pilings in 10' deep water. The rest of the dock ws pretty normal.
There was one issue though. The diagonal support for the cantilevered dock needed a bolt to go through the pilings under the water. How would I drill the hole for the bolt when it is under the water? When I drew up the cantilever dock I didn't know how I would drill the holes underwater but I just went ahead and submitted the plans to building department anyway. This situation is somewhat like the situation in this link.
During June of 2015, I got my miracle. Because the water in the canal was so low, I was able to drill my bolt holes without having to drill underwater. The water level was never this low for the entire year. But when I was ready to install the cantilever dock the water level was perfect. Talk about timing.
Nevertheless I had to drill very close to the water. On occasion the electric drill would slip out of my hands and rotate into the water causing the breaker to trip. Sometimes the drill got so wet I could feel a slight tingling sensation in my hand due to the electricity.
Needless to say electricity and water don't mix. A lot of people have been electrocuted when using electricity around water. In fact according to this article 400 people die each year in the USA due to electricity and that doesn't count the people who died from the 140,000 fires electricity started each year. What saved me from being hurt was that I was always plugging my tools into ground fault interrupter (GFI) protected outlets.
I highly recommend if you don't have a house that is wired with GFI protection that you use a GFI extension cord especially if your working outside or near water.
What a GFI does is it trips a breaker when there is current flow to ground. To do this it relies on the fact that when everything is working right, current flows out the hot wire to the tool and then back to ground via the neutral wire. The currents in the two wires are equal. The GFI senses if there is any difference between the two currents and if there is it trips because that means there is current flow to ground perhaps from the tool through a person's body into the water. The GFI in effect exploits Kirchhoff's current law (KCL): a law commonly used in electrical engineering; where the sum of the currents at a node must equal zero. See this link for a picture of what I just explained.
However sometimes GFI outlets don't work or fail. That's why they should not be trusted or relied on to protect a persons life. So don't take risks because you think the GFI will protect you. In fact sometimes they are wired wrong. There is a test button on the GFI outlet that can be pushed to see if it is working properly. The question is will it work the next time?
After successfully drilling the holes, I finished the cantilevered dock in about a week. The diagonal supports and the finished cantilever dock are shown below
Not to long after the dock portion was finished the water level rose to above the dock. I never remembered this happening before except when a hurricane passed through and it made me wonder if I should have built the dock higher. But this is a rare occurrence so I'm not to worried about it.
In the next picture most of the u shaped dock can be seen.
After the U shaped dock was installed it was time to make all the boat lift pilings the same height so that the roof that went on top of them could be level. Only problem was they were over 15 feet high and could not be cut with my circular saw. To solve the problem I bought the top of the line chainsaw which is made by Stihl.
Once I got the chainsaw, I realized how dangerous it was and started looking at chainsaw videos on how to be safe. I also googled chainsaw accidents and surveyed the images and was horrified. I recommend you only do this if your going to use a chain saw. I will not post any thing gruesome in this blog.
After investigating safety and accidents I found out that the chainsaw can kick upwards (kickback). What happens to be in the way of a chainsaw that is propelling itself upwards? The face! This is why the best chainsaws like my Stihl come with a chain break that activates if the saw undergoes kickback
Here is an instructional video demonstrating kickback but not aimed at the face. Notice all the safety gear the guy has on including face shield and Kevlar chaps to protect the legs. He gets kickback to occur by putting the tip of the saw into the wood. Another common mistake that happens is the ladder gets knocked out from under the person by the tree branch that he is cutting.
I also ran across some pretty phenomenal tree cutting videos. Check out this video and this video.
Since I had never used a chainsaw before I practiced on a few old pilings in the yard and then came up with a jig to help me cut a piling off nice and level. It is based off this video but I did not go to the full extent of the jig that is shown in the video. My jig and the results are shown below on my shorter practice pilings.
After all the short pilings were cut I then focused on the over 15' tall pilings. I wasn't sure on how to go about it so the first thing I tried was using a ladder. I bought the best A frame fiberglass ladder I could find at Lowes. Incidentally, if you are going to buy a ladder, buy a fiberglass one. Fiberglass is non conductive and protects against accidental electric shock when it hits a power line or when someone touches a live wire when they're standing on the ladder. Its not full proof of course.
The ladder I bought had a nice wide sturdy base and was tall enough so I didn't have to stand on the very top step (standing on the top step is dangerous and not recommended). For safety, I tied the ladder off to the piling and I put on a safety harness which would stop me from falling to the ground if I got knocked off the ladder. I put the jig at the top of the piling, put my face shield on and then climbed to the top of the ladder and made the cut.
It was so scary. The vibration of the chainsaw made me think that if the chainsaw hiccuped or kicked back a little I would be knocked off the ladder. Keep in mind I had no hands on the ladder. Both hands were on the chainsaw. After cutting another piling this way, I realized that my ladder was to big to fit on the dock and be positioned correctly to cut off many of the pilings for the boat lift. I had to come up with another way.
What I ended up doing was building a very stable scaffold on the pilings so that I had a nice platform to stand on when cutting the pilings. This is shown below.
This plan worked out very well but was still a little scary.
There still was one issue with this method. The piling end that I cut off would be launched into the canal by the chainsaw. It was actually kind of neat how the chainsaw would make a big racket and then launch the piling end into the canal with a big splash for the finale. Once this happened I would have to stop the chainsaw and put it down on the platform. Run down the ladder and fish it out with the net.
One time the piling was beyond the reach of the net so I had to jump in my kayak. I then chased after the piling in my kayak and when I caught up to it, I attempted to load it into the kayak. But when I did the kayak rolled over and I fell into the canal.
When in the water I swam to the dock with the piling and kayak. But I couldn't get on to the dock because the water level was so low compared to the dock. After spending a few minutes trying to get out of the water, I found a rope attached to a dock piling and pulled myself out. My thought then was perhaps I should build a dock ladder. All this was quite a show for my neighbors I'm sure.
Once all the boat lift pilings were the same height, I could now focus on the boat lift portion which required some very heavy 8" x 8" treated beams to be placed on top of the pilings and the installation of a very awkward 30' long metal pole to wrap the lift cables on. Since I had no one helping me this would turn out to be very challenging. So challenging in fact that I actually had to break one of my steadfast rules to get the job done. Find out what rule I broke in the next blog.
Happy Building!
The Dr.
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