[TowerTalk] Tower foundation and bedrock

[Wes]

My first wife's father operated a marble quarry a few miles east of Tucson.  He 
blasted all of the time.  Once he asked me to pick up a case of dynamite for him 
from Apache Powder Company near Benson, AZ.  To show how times have changed, I 
drove down in my new 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner and they loaded me up and slapped 
a big sign on the trunk shouting "Explosives Class A".  I drove back to Tucson 
down I-10 with everyone giving me a wide berth.

Even earlier in my youth a friend of my dad was one of the two well drillers in 
S. Arizona. He always had some dynamite around.  He had homesteaded a ranch in 
Sonoita, AZ and in those days there was no electricity; just an outhouse, a 
propane refrigerator and wood cook stove.  I spent a lot of weekends and some 
summers down there working cattle, helping drill wells, climbing windmill towers 
and cutting wood.  A couple of his sons and I would be tasked with this and to 
"speed up" the process, it wasn't unheard of to take a 1/4 stick of dynamite to 
a scrub Oak tree and reduce it to manageable pieces.

Wes  N7WS

On 4/10/2019 4:35 PM, jimlux wrote:
>
> People get all freaked out by the fact that it's an explosive, and yet, 
> they'll explode gallons of gasoline, a little bit at a time, in a trailer 
> mounted compressor to run the pneumatic hammers.