I have just bought a lamp-post for my front garden to replace a small pedestal that had been knocked over too many times. I am planning to make a base for it to stand on using threaded rod and angles buried in concrete.
how deep does it need to be?
Should I use stainless steel, or will mild be good enough for this purpose?
How do I work out how much concrete to mix? considering that bags of cement and ballast are sold by weight and holes in the ground are measured by volume?
A cubic metre of well compacted concrete weighs 2.4 tonnes. With poor compaction such as you get when pouring concrete into a hole, you should still expect to get around 2.0 tonnes to the cubic metre.
Also, take more care with your attribution, because the words you quoted were not Mr Hansen's. So stand by for some of the usual mock outrage from Mr. H. ;-)
On Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:25:39 +0000 someone who may be snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote this:-
I saw one once, in a house occupied by two friends. An old gaslight, converted to electricity, but an original cast iron one rather than a modern one. It fitted in quite well. I asked the occupants about it and was informed, with a straight face, that the lady of the house had come back from the pub one evening with it over her shoulder:-)
For streetlamps, typically they extend into the ground by around
15% of their height above ground, but they are sometimes set into a vertical pipe which does effectively extend the depth. For a relatively short column which you probably have, this figure probably needs to be more than 15%, as much of that will just be in the topsoil which won't provide much of a foundation.
Many years ago, I saw the contractor's spec for lining a long drive with gaslamp style electric lighting. These were done by setting a length of fat pipe vertically, well below ground level in concrete. Pipe hole left empty. When this was set, the lamp column is stood in it, packed in with mortar with almost no cement in it (I think this it to allow it to be pulled out if it has to be replaced). The bit which I particularly liked was that the columns had to be set randomly a few degrees off-vertical, but never towards the road. In the picture of the final result, it looked like a road with gaslamp columns which had been there for over 100 years. The setting of them randomly slightly off-vertical was a very clever design effect.
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