Thick walls????

[Guest Peter James]

Seeing all these posts about pipes reminded me of a story about an instalation that I did around 10 years ago.

It was a Doctors surgery made up of two semi detached house,s knocked into one big house.

The bit that caught me out was that because the building was built on a hill one half of the building was on a about 3ft difference in level, (The fact that I had been walking up and down three steps when traveling between the two buildings hadnt seemed to of sunk in).

I was trying to run a cable between the two buildings, I was on the 1st floor of the 1st building in a cupboard that ran from floor to ceiling, the attached side of the property also had a cupboard that backed onto the first. I decided that if I drilled at a high level I could run the cable straight out of the cupboard and along the picture rail. I sent the trainee round the other side to let me know when I was through, I drilled and drilled used the full lenth of 1.5 foot drill bit still not through.

As I had never drilled between two propertys before I was not sure how thick the walls would be. I had a very long drill bit in the van I bought it when we installed a sytem in a old manor house the walls were three foot thick(we nicknamed it excalibre)

So I got excalibre from the van, and commenced drilling again, The trainee could still not see any sign of a hole and i was definately hitting something (although it didnt feel like a wall) every time I pulled my drill back it had a sort of white powder like creamy chalk dust on it. After giving it the full lenght of excalibre I could see light, but the trainee couldnt see my drill bit, I decided I should take a look myself. On my way it clicked that I had gone down more stairs than I had gone up, We went up another flight of stairs to discover I had drilled through several packets of baby milk and the cupboard door.

Fortunatly the customer saw the funny side and we lost nothing but my pride.

[Guest Adrian]

B) LOL

Adrian B)

[Guest pactech]

That is a great story,

Just to add when I was installing we were given some new long drills in which to make them longer You just screwed on an extension bit and when you got the right lenth you then screwed on the mason master.

So there I am looking good with my extendable drill(no Jokes please!), So I start drilling the hole for the bell cable and everything is going great until the drill Jams so what does any engineer do (and Me not thinking) stop the drill and slam it into reverse opps, the four extenders and the mason master unscrew them selfs while in the wall, Just lost new drill bit and bits. They are still stuck in the wall on the site after that I complained to my supervisior that the drill bits were rubbish and I was quite happy with the long (single piece) ones.

Steve

[breff]

couldnt u just have screwed it back 2gether?

[neil.c]

Drilling through the wall on my own house of all places when installing a tv aerial downlead, I think I am drilling into the loft but end up a good foot down the wall in the master bedroom. You would think I would have noticed this.

At least it was a new house so the builders painters patched it up and painted it with the ubiquitous magnolia paint.

[Guest IM_Alarms]

He He....

I was once drilling into an understair cupboard at skirting height and happened across the 4" post holding the stairs up, so decided to take it off hammer and just push it through. Well ten minutes later I finally got through and pulled back my red hot drill bit. I push the cable through and fed "plenty" into the cupboard which was so full of junk I hadn't bothered to pre-clear it. I was figuring on just reaching behind it all and fishing the cable clear, which is what I tried to do.......... and tried some more ........ and tried some more. Until I finally decided to clear the cupboard to see where my cable was. Eventially pulling out all the last bottles of xmas plonk to find my cable (about 5M lon) inside a bottle of Scotch !!!

It appears that the bottle must have been tight up against the wood and my drill was just the right temperature to burn its way through. It looked like a pickled snake. I'm sure the customer thought I been drinking with all that smell after i'd pulled it out..........