A few years back the power company was moving poles and lines for a road widening project near me. They were right in front of a big scrap yard that had not just one main power line feeding it, but two. Funny thing, no one knew where the second service drew off of, just that there was a meter. While drilling the hole for a new pole the auger hit the second line. I didn"t see it but reports, from a friend who had a shop beside the scrap yard, were that the resulting blast nearly blew the auger out of the ground and the guy running it was stumbling around in the road, singed, with smoke coming off of him like something you"d see in the cartoons. Fortunately the operator was only "close" to the blast and wasn"t seriously hurt, he just singed all of his exposed hair......and needless to say they found out that day where the second power line fed from. Dad watched a guy swing a crane into a cross country high voltage line while showing him a problem with the swing mechanism. Don"t know what all got knocked out power wise but the sparks lit a large broom straw field on fire. Dad said the result was red and blue lights, and sirens coming from everywhere in about two minutes, followed closely by pickup and bucket trucks from the power company. Personally I haven"t hit anything underground but I once bumped an overhead line with the boom on an excavator mounted rock drill. It had been parked under the lines and I didn"t realize how close to the lines I was until I tracked the machine to one side to get away from a silt fence and heard a pop. Knocked out power to a neighborhood for about two hours until they could get a guy out to check the line and replace the fuse that I blew out. Fortunately all I had done was momentarily cross the hot and neutral lines when a hydraulic line on the drill boom bumped them. Nothing came down and all it did was burn a small spot on the neutral line which was easily repaired with a splice. Never did see a bill for the job. I always suspected they were either, one just glad I was honest and called about the problem, because otherwise they would have never spotted the cause on their own, and/or two that I showed the repair guy where the problem was, and then spent the whole time BS"ing with the two supervisors in pickups that showed up. As a reslut they knew that although I was technically at fault for hitting it that I was just the mechanic and the machine wasn"t mine therefore I hadn"t parked the thing in a position to where the line was apt to be hit by someone working without a second guy for a spotter. Sometimes you just get lucky.....it could have been the 44,000 volt lines running across the field 25 yards away. Then I would have knocked out power to a whole town and I imagine it would have been EXPENSIVE...
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Today's Featured Article - A Belt Pulley? Really Doing Something? - by Chris Pratt. Belt Pulleys! Most of us conjure up a picture of a massive thresher with a wide belt lazily arching to a tractor 35 feet away throwing a cloud of dust, straw and grain, and while nostalgic, not too practical a method of using our tractors. While this may have been the bread and butter of the belt work in the past (since this is what made the money on many farms), the smaller tasks may have been and still can be its real claim to fame. The thresher would bring in the harvest (and income) once a y
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