I can't tell you how many crankshafts I replaced over the years dew to sighted people doing the same things. One guy bent his so bad you couldn't turn it with a wrench and he said it was something I did wrong in the shop. so for fun, I put a straight edge to the crank for him. You didn't need feeler gauges to check the bend, I think a screw driver tip would have fit between the edge and the crank. ----- Original Message ----- From: Lee A. Stone To: blindhandyman@yahoogroups.com Sent: Saturday, June 13, 2009 10:56 PM Subject: Re: [BlindHandyMan] Finding my curb box.
Dan I know right where mine is and it is like yours no top cap. actually when my mother in law was still alive and owned this place the shut of stuck up a couple of inches maybe fro the lawn. well she had a brand new front wheel drive power mower a beautiful 4 horsepower electric start. so I had enough sight to be dangerous like Boop says and on my second pass along the front lawn . that nice bolens mower trimmed the water shut off to ground leve. however the lawmower bit the dust. I think she said I bent or twisted the shaft . sometimes as a blind person it does not pay to try and be helpful. big grins. so we put a tomato sauce can over the top and that remians ground level. Lee On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 10:48:14PM -0400, Dan Rossi wrote: > So, in preparation for some plumbing work, I had to find my curb box, > where they turn the water off to the house. Most of my neighbors you can > easily find their curb boxes, they are either right in the side walk in > front of the house, or in the lawn, but uncovered. > > Teresa did a survey of our lawn, but no visual sign of anything. I have a > large metal stake and started probing the lawn for a bit each evening. > After only about 15 minutes of probing I did find the shut-off > for the gas, but no joy on the water all week. > > This is not a large area and I probed the hell out of it and pulled a good > sized pile of rocks, some quite large out of the lawn. It looks like a > deranged gopher had at my yard. > > Today I went and rented a metal detector. After practicing for a few > minutes, finding the gas shut-off a few times, I started sweeping the > lawn. I found a few more rocks. Then I kept getting a hit in this one > area. I would get a hit, probe with the stake, but didn't find anything, > a large rock, but no cap for the shut-off. I kept getting a strong hit > though. > > I started digging in that area and eventually found out why my probing had > not found the shut-off. The cap was missing and the pipe filled with > dirt. So, when I was probing, I might have hit it, but only the edge of > the pipe, so more probing wouldn't have shown me that there was a large > flat cap there. > > I dug, scraped, and shop vacked out the dirt until I got down to the > actual shut-off valve. I think I might have a problem as the head of the > valve seems to be up against the side of the vertical pipe, possibly it > has shifted. > > I think I have done as much as is required to save me the money of the > time required to pay someone else to find it, but I am thinking I might > leave it up to someone else to turn it off since, if they break it, it > should be their problem, not mine, to replace. > > Nothing is ever easy on an 80-odd year old house. > > -- > Blue skies. > Dan Rossi > Carnegie Mellon University. > E-Mail: d...@andrew.cmu.edu > Tel: (412) 268-9081 -- Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind... -- Percy Bysshe Shelley . [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
