I use a BIG DeWalt rotary hammer drill with a 48" x 1 1/8" carbide rock bit.
I dig a hole down until I hit rock and then bore the hole at the bottom of
it. Then I drive a piece of 1 inch (1 1/16" OD) copper pipe in the hole
after I have drilled 1/8" holes in the side of the pipe. Once in the hole I
fill it with Epsom Salt (magnesium sulfate). Supposedly the first 5 feet of
a ground rod does most of the grounding anyway. The rock drill was
purchased originally for drilling holes for T-posts. The method works for
grounding electric fence too.
Gary J
N5BAA
-----Original Message-----
From: Mickey Baker
Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2014 10:11 AM
To: D. Drake
Cc: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Ground Rod Myths?
Believe it or not, we have rocks in Florida, too.
I use a 1/2" hammer drill, applied to the top of the rod with an old deep
socket. Unless I hit a boulder, it works very quickly, there's lots of
ground rod surface area in compressed contact with the earth and there's no
mud!
73,
Mickey
On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 11:00 AM, D. Drake <daleaa1qd@gmail.com> wrote:
Here at my station in New DurHAM, New HAMpshire
on Middleton Rd (off of HAM Road) I have very
rocky soil. I tried the garden hose trick and
found it was not a good method in this soil
although it worked quite well in the clay soil at
my old QTH in Dover, NH.
I also use a fence post driver like W4WEG but I
also lubricate the rod with liquid dish soap to
reduce the friction and it makes driving a lot
easier. About 20% of the time I hit a big enough
rock that I have to pull the rod out and start
over. The soap also makes it a bit easier to pull
the rod out in those cases. Driving the rod in at
angle really does nothing to avoid the rocks.
In the literature I have read on grounding it
mentions using salt to increase ground
conductivity but also says that it's a temporary
effect and unless you keep "salting" it
periodically there's little to gain by doing it
once and just salting near the surface will have
little effect for most of the length of the rod.
I assume the time that the effect lasts depends on
soil moisture content and how quickly that
moisture moves through the ground around it
dissipating the salt.
Dale, AA1QD
Message: 7
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 16:08:57 -0500
From: "Bill Grimwood" <bill@grimwood.net>
To: "'Patrick Greenlee'"
<patrick_g@windstream.net>,
<towertalk@contesting.com>
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Ground Rod Myths?
Message-ID: <001d01cf5f38$3df35c00$b9da1400$@net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
I use a metal fence post driver to drive ground
rods. It works real well.
Bill, W4WEG
-----Original Message-----
From: TowerTalk
[mailto:towertalk-bounces@contesting.com] On
Behalf Of
Patrick Greenlee
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 2:32 PM
To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Ground Rod Myths?
I used galvanized water pipe in place of EMT for
water-drilling a hole
for a ground rod. I put a "T" at the top of the
pipe and cut the bottom
end of the pipe at an angle like a hypodermic
needle. One side of the T
is screwed onto the male threads on the pipe and
the adapter to join a
water hose to a galvanized pipe is screwed onto
the horizontal part of
the T. The top part of the T gets a cap. You can
tap on the cap with a
hammer to help get through hard spots. The ID of
the pipe needs to be
larger than the OD of the rod. You may want to
fill the pipe with Epsom
Salts before starting to increase conductivity in
the ground near the
rod. You can refill the pipe with Epsom Slats by
removing the T
temporarily during the process.
The same setup (less the Epsom Salts) can be used
to "drill" under a
sidewalk for things like placing a ground radial.
I have a "demo hammer" (miniature electric jack
hammer) and have
fashioned a "tool bit" for it that is a concave
cup. This combo will
drive in a 8 ft ground rod where a sledge hammer
couldn't (rod would
bend.) Two or three lengths of pipe, say 1, 2, and
3-4 ft with ID a
little greater than the OD of the ground rod will
keep the ground rod
from bending when delivering really robust
sledgehammer blows. Start
with the longer pipe and as the rod is driven
change to shorter ones.
The pipe keeps the rod from bending under the
blows of the sledge. I
have not needed the pipe "exoskeleton" when
driving with the demo
hammer, just with the sledge.
When driving is just about impossible with a
sledge I have found that
the demo hammer will git 'er done, albeit
sometimes slowly. Digging out
a little funnel shape at the surface and pouring
in water usually makes
the driving easier and faster but not always.
Epsom Salts in this little
funnel shape will increase your ground
conductivity. The above comments
are not necessarily appropriate in all cases,
especially where the sub
surface structure is essentially solid rock.
Of course YMMV!
Patrick NJ5G
.
On 4/23/2014 12:49 PM, Jon Pearl - W4ABC wrote:
> Hi Gary,
>
> I used this method a few years back and found
that it worked very
> quickly.
>
> If you use an appropriately sized female garden
hose repair coupler,
> such as
>
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Ray-Padula-Metal-5-8-in
-Garden-Hose-Female-Thread
-Repair-with-Stainless-Steel-Clamps-RP-RIFR-6/2051
67514
> and pound it into a piece of appropriately sized
EMT, you'll have the
> all that you need. I (lightly) held the EMT in
a vice and inserted
> the nipple end of the coupler into the EMT. I
inserted a ratchet
> socket into the female hose end of the coupler
and used a hammer to
> tap the back of the socket so as to drive the
nipple end into the EMT.
>
> To install the ground rod, you simply turn on
the water supply and
> start driving the 10' stick of EMT into the soil
till you reach the
> desired depth. Turn off the water supply,
remove the EMT and drop
> your ground rod. Once I had the rods at the
desired depth, I once
> again used water to back fill some of the soil
that was pushed up out
> of the hole by the water. Since I'm in central
Florida & the soil is
> pretty sandy, I found that refilling the hole
around the ground rod
> works pretty well as there's a lot of resistance
by the ground rod to
> being pulled back out by hand after back
filling.
>
> I just took a picture of a 1/2" ground rod
sitting along side a 10'
> piece of 1/2" EMT with the female repair coupler
attached and I placed
> it on my web site at
http://www.w4abc.com/hydrogroundrod.html
>
>
>
> 73,
>
>
> Jon Pearl - W4ABC
> www.w4abc.com
>
>
> On 4/23/2014 9:22 AM, Gary Smith wrote:
>> I used to live in NE Illinois and in southern
Louisiana and that's
>> exactly how I did my long grounding rods. No
stones at all to run
>> into. Here in Connecticut it took a lot of
effort to find exact
>> placement for my HI-Z Rx array, the soil is one
big rock with a thin
>> surface layer dirt on top. Get a few inches
down & hit solid.
>>
>> 73,
>>
>> Gary
>> KA1J
>>
>>
>
>
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Mickey Baker, N4MB
Fort Lauderdale, FL
*“Tell me, and I will listen. Show me, and I will understand. Involve me,
and I will learn.” *Teton Lakota, American Indian Saying.
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