Spirint uses a screwdriver here. They barely part the sod and shove their flooded line in right under the thatch. I don't recomend it but they swear it works fine. The cable company uses a wide "edger" looking tool. A flat blade on a handle. One guy chops a slit and holds the sod back while the other guy shoves the cable in. They go pretty fast.
I had some cable I buried where I used to live. I got tired of repeated digging to repair it (I think the cable damage was from some animal chewing on it).
Replacing the cable should be easy, using the old cable (it it's not completely broken) to pull the new cable throught.
That's a mattock, not an adze. An adze would have either a single sharp cutter on one side, a single cutter with a hammer face on the other, or a single cutter with a pin hammer (not sure of the terminology) on the other for setting spikes in boat building.
We think of an adze as giving a pretty rough finish, but the Spartans didn't use adzes as they thought the finish was too smooth and effeminate. Maybe that's why they had marble toilet seats. ;)
The cable tv company has a little vibrator thingy that works while the guy stands up. It wiggles a blade, I think, and cuts a slit and puts the wire in the slit at the same time. When he was done, I forget if he had to walk on it once, but it looked good as new when he was done.
It might have been gas powered since he does it all day. I don't think it was electric and it certainly wasn't manual. And I'm sure the wire wasn't more than 3 inches below the surface, maybe less.
I don't know if rental places have these or not, but for only 40 feet with a kid some of the other ideas for slitting the ground sound good enough.
Kids should do hard work between 12 or 13 and 29. It is so much easier to build muscles then. The smarter they are or the more likely they are to get a white collar job, the more they should do hard work, at least some times, when they are that age, because the less likely they are to do hard work at work, and they often even get white collar summer jobs once they are in college.
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the picture shows a mattock (mentioned a few times in the Old Testament). if the small blade is rotated 90°, it's an adze. both are sold at Home Depot.
The cable guys don't care because it's just a job, and they do what they're told. But the cable company cares, and doesn't want to be redoing work over and over, so if that's what happened next, the cable company wouldn't do it this way.
My cable went in 22 years ago, but I stopped using cable about 12 years ago. All I can say is that everything was fine for the first
10 years, and it comes from a box about 90 feet away.
And how long before the yard looks decent again? How long before the depression, or bump, goes away?
It took the cable guy (one guy) about 10 or 15 minutes to install the line, iirc. No more than a half hour.
. Put in a 1" PVC conduit with a pull string. Run two RG6
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Why so deep? Just under the turf is usually adequate for coax installations.
You can rent a machine made specifically for the purpose.
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Click on "Rental Items". Our local rental yards have similar machines, and they are not as big and destructive as using a "ditch-witch". They are also much cheaper to rent.
The cable won't last longer if it's 10 feet deep. It just needs to be out of the way of the lawn mower. It's a lot cheaper to slit it under the sod than to dig a deep trench and fix the grass.
Mine went in 20 years ago when the house was new. About five years ago they had to replace the line when I went to Internet cable and digital TV. THe lead in was fine for analog TV but too much loss for the bits.
I didn't even notice when they did mine. They had to lay the cable on the ground because it was frozen harder than a rock. In the spring I called to see when they'd bury it. They already had.
replying to bill allemann, Jeff wrote: There's a tool called a Hitch-N-Ditch that might work if you have a truck or tractor.
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Here's a Youtube video of it in action.
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While we are on Youtube, there's also this guy who made a hand tool for short distances and he also has a "tractor" with a similar trenching tool on it..
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