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**Bill Harsey** · 07-21-2004, 14:22

One Friday afternoon my brother and I were working up a tough draw full of this deep soil. To spring a hole for loading the shot we'd punch down between the root webs a hole big enough for one stick of dynamite, put a cap in and place the stick in the hole using the length of the blasting cap wires for the minimum safe distance gauge. I think they were about 6 feet long. This wasn't as bad as it sounds, just throw them across the top of the stump, get low on the other side and touch it off. Now you could fill two or three of these sprung holes with all the powder you wanted and work hard to tamp in soil on top to make the shot good. Doing all this right can result in failed shots because of soft soil and boy did we have it there. It's a lot more work to re-fill a big hole than a small one and this was getting hard. We finally got thru a tough series of stumps in the draw and started up a little slope. About that time we felt fully justified in calling out "Double Load Friday". This would solve the soft soil problem and we'd get to burn some powder. The other rule was to not do more than two stumps in a series. We always shunted off the leads while loading but the more wiring you did, the greater the possibility of something not going right. We'd just loaded 5 stumps in a series, all greater than 60 inches which meant at least 120 sticks per stump. Since this was a much bigger shot than usual we got two hundred feet away, I know that for a fact because that's all the wire we had for the detonator. To be extra safe we parked the cat downhill away from the shot and got behind the blade. About then Dad comes rolling up and asks how we're doing. "Uh, fine Dad, we've got "a couple" stumps loaded and ready to go." Dad says "let's do it". I looked at my brother, he looked at me and there was only one thing to do. wire it up and shoot. That whole damned hillside came apart took off and went skyward. The rigging crew was hiding under logs to get out of the falling rocks and they were a quarter mile away. Dad didn't say a thing. We went over to look at the shot, the stumps had sat on near solid rock and we didn't know it. Nothing went down, it all went up and away. We only had fragments to push out of the way. The crew was cussing us for not warning them and all Dad said when we got home that night was "I finally found something the boys could do good".

07-21-2004, 14:22	#2
Bill Harsey Bladesmith to the Quiet Professionals Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Oregon, Land of the Silver Grey Sunsets Posts: 3,886	One Friday afternoon my brother and I were working up a tough draw full of this deep soil. To spring a hole for loading the shot we'd punch down between the root webs a hole big enough for one stick of dynamite, put a cap in and place the stick in the hole using the length of the blasting cap wires for the minimum safe distance gauge. I think they were about 6 feet long. This wasn't as bad as it sounds, just throw them across the top of the stump, get low on the other side and touch it off. Now you could fill two or three of these sprung holes with all the powder you wanted and work hard to tamp in soil on top to make the shot good. Doing all this right can result in failed shots because of soft soil and boy did we have it there. It's a lot more work to re-fill a big hole than a small one and this was getting hard. We finally got thru a tough series of stumps in the draw and started up a little slope. About that time we felt fully justified in calling out "Double Load Friday". This would solve the soft soil problem and we'd get to burn some powder. The other rule was to not do more than two stumps in a series. We always shunted off the leads while loading but the more wiring you did, the greater the possibility of something not going right. We'd just loaded 5 stumps in a series, all greater than 60 inches which meant at least 120 sticks per stump. Since this was a much bigger shot than usual we got two hundred feet away, I know that for a fact because that's all the wire we had for the detonator. To be extra safe we parked the cat downhill away from the shot and got behind the blade. About then Dad comes rolling up and asks how we're doing. "Uh, fine Dad, we've got "a couple" stumps loaded and ready to go." Dad says "let's do it". I looked at my brother, he looked at me and there was only one thing to do. wire it up and shoot. That whole damned hillside came apart took off and went skyward. The rigging crew was hiding under logs to get out of the falling rocks and they were a quarter mile away. Dad didn't say a thing. We went over to look at the shot, the stumps had sat on near solid rock and we didn't know it. Nothing went down, it all went up and away. We only had fragments to push out of the way. The crew was cussing us for not warning them and all Dad said when we got home that night was "I finally found something the boys could do good". Last edited by Bill Harsey; 07-21-2004 at 14:25.
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