Day 3 - Oct 8, 2007

I laid an extension cord to the opening of the cave. So now I have power. Tried out my hammer drill to see how well it worked on rock. I have an "American Tool Exchange 1 inch hammer drill set". I bought two of these some time back, one for me and one for my employee. After not very long one of them broke. So I have not been very impressed with these. It went into the rock reasonably quickly. I did not really time it, but maybe 1 minute for a 3 inch hole at 3/8 diameter. But it was not really good at getting the dust out deeper than 3 inches. Also when you are not pushing on it it will not turn the bit, so taking it out was much harder than it would otherwise have been. Anyway, I ordered a new hammer drill. I also ordered some Bull Pins and some caps. But on this island it takes like a month to get things.

Brought in the jackhammer (picture after use really). This is my pet backhoe, named "Faith". It is an Allmand TBL 220, a very nice machine. As the bible says, Faith can move mountains, at least really small ones.

Using the jackhammer I enlarged the opening to the cave so that I could work on the problem part. The tape measurer has just over 4 feet of tape out.

The jackhammer gave out (bit of smoke so I stopped) just after starting to work inside the cave. I am hoping it just overheated, but I don't know yet. That 3 inch ball makes it look like the opening is big enough. However, the difficult passage is about half the distance to the ball, so smaller than it looks.

That yellow square is 1 foot by 1 foot. At my chest I am about 1 foot by 2 feet. So things are still a bit tight.