Hammer and spade

About 14 months ago our hot water supply line from the garage to the house started leaking. I discovered this in the middle of December when I noticed moss growing on the cedar shingle siding of our house above two foundation vents. It was a fast leak, about three gallons an hour, and it's a testament to our foundation drainage that the whole crawlspace wasn't flooded over the three months or so that this leak was going.

We hired a plumber to repair the leak and replace the old iron supply pipes with copper. (I was more than happy to pay a professional to do this, since it involved torch work under the house, in an 18 inch crawlspace, in what must've been six inches of sticky mud.) The plumber rented an electric jackhammer to tear up the garage floor where the pipes passed down through the slab, then he used the hammer and a clay spade to dig up the trench in the clay between the buildings.

This latter innovation is something I hadn't seen before. It took the plumber maybe 10 minutes to dig a trench that would've taken me two hours with a pick and shovel. Since then we've rented a Hilti 25lb. hammer several times to break up our hardpan clay in preparation for patio building, garden bed amendment, and post hole digging. It turns two-weekend jobs into one-morning jobs all by itself, and that's worth the $70 rental.

In the picture below you see a model holding the hammer we use for yard work. This picture illustrates a nice fiction that a 25lb. hammer can be used to break up a large slab, when in fact holding the hammer the way illustrated will wreck nothing but your lower back. When I use this hammer for clay work I hold it by the loop handle at the top with two hands and let it work itself in with its own weight. When we do concrete demolition I usually rent a 60lb. Bosch hammer and a chisel point.