Nothing really happened at the building site other than keeping the grass and weeds trimmed. Had a meeting out there with the coordinator from Cotton Inc to look over the property so they could plan their course of action. That really left me with very little to do this week. However we did manage to get one thing done. I will have a cold storage that will have a slab poured on top as well as a deck surface over this. I will need to support the deck rim joist against the end of this slab. So I decided I would need some special anchor bolts. Normal anchor bolts of course go straight up and down. You insert the "J" portion in the concrete wall and leave the threaded portion out sufficient length for the sill plates. In my case this will be 4" as I will be having a double sill plate. However I did not want a straight pin coming out of the slab as support for the deck rim joist. So I bought seven 16" anchor bolts with the intention of having a 90degree bend placed in them so they could be inserted in the concrete wall and then stick out for the rim joist. My initial plan was to get a local person who has a bit of a machine shop do the work for me. However he got busy I presume getting ready for a trip overseas and never called me back. So while sitting on the front porch looking at my truck it occurred to me that if I removed the trailer hitch ball there was a hole in the receiver that was just a bit larger than the anchor bolt and maybe with some judicious heat and force I could bend them myself. Unfortunately I do not have a large enough or strong enough vise setup in Mom's garage to do this. Well that was a great plan however trailer hitch ball had other ideas and didn't want to come loose. So on to plan B. When I was preparing plan A I had brought out a concrete block to be used as a support for the end of the anchor bolt. After looking at the block I realized that if I placed a spacer in one of the holes there was just enough room for the "J" end of the anchor bolt and the height was just the correct height for where the bend in the anchor bolt needed to be.
So we now had a plan of action, we assembled all the tools required, torch, gloves, concrete block, wooden spacer and a pipe to bend the bolt. Here is a shot of some of this.
So we have Oxy-Acetylene system with torch and a concrete block with a wood spacer. Only issue here was that the tip attached to the hoses was my small one and therefore the time to heat the anchor bolt was longer than normal. However we then proceeded to heat up the anchor bolt at the bend line. Once heated sufficiently we used a longer pipe that slipped over the threads to apply force to put a 90 degree bend in the anchor bolt. Here are two pictures showing the heating and bending process.
After the angle was reached we placed the part aside to cool and went on to do another one. And that is how I "McGyvered" a straight anchor bolt to a bent anchor bolt as shown in the following two pictures.
Well until next week. Enjoy and stay safe out there.
Harold
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