My new client and Quarry update

[doc henderson]

We had a great time and hope to make another trip in the future.    We hope to host an event in the future and that you can see our part of the world.  I still have to adjust and figure out this part time/retired thing out.

[Stephen1]

Ramon, That skidded would look a lot better after you armour all the tires and give the skidded a wash and Wax!

[teakwood]

I bought those palms at a garden store in town for expensive money. so a guy who i know for a long time came here to pic up sawmill waste, so we are talking about the new garden and everything and he goes, remember i have a plant business, dang i didn't think of him. "i will bring you palms and bushes and flowers for free, but man could i use those 1x1" cut offs", (when we edge boards on the sawmill). He uses them for tomato sticks, making temporary shade fixtures, all kind of inventions. take as many as you want, i said.
long story short we will seperate all cut offs now for him and he brought me some plants, and man did he deliver! now i have more plants than ideas where to put them


keep on going with the digging, lots of ripper work. behind the excavator was the old driveway, which now gets flattened and will get a retaining dirt dam, to block the noise of the road against my house

[tule peak timber]

Very nice Ramon, I'm surprised that you didn't sprinkle in a few fruit trees also in your landscape paradise. I ate a banana from Costco yesterday and it can't hold a candle to your fresh picked bunches!
  

[teakwood]

remember when we did the hike in my plantation? at the end we went thru the fruit and citrus plantation area i have, so i don't need more around the house. several members went with me to see it, but somebody, (i will not mention any names) was so tired after fishing for 8 hours and just wanted to go back to the house, lol 

[tule peak timber]

OUCH !

[caveman]

The kiln dried bananas were the best I've ever had.  You may have a niche market with kiln dried fruit.  The gringos like it.  

[teakwood]

keep on digging, ripped open the old driveway put the hose down for the new underground electrical service, fill up and made a 8' high dirt wall/dam over it, replanted some old bushes on top. All this is designed to close up like a jungle to block the noisy Pan-American road. the old style nasty jake brake is still used widely here, the more they sound the more truck they feel under their asses! all silencers are gone or taken out


the cherry tomatoes are growing nicely

[teakwood]

still lots of truckloads left but i'm seeing the end of it. all that dirt still needs to go


the flat area for the guys who pick up planer shavings is getting very big!


green area will be extended a little more 

[barbender]

We still have plenty of the old style Jake Brakes here, in fact new trucks are still outfitted with them. I get you, they are loud and obnoxious, especially when guys feel the need to straight pipe their trucks. I do feel they are essential though, especially if in hills and mountainous terrain. In my experiences with off road wood hauling, a Jake set on single stage is often the only braking you can use without locking up wheels using your service brakes.

That doesn't make them less obnoxious for bystanders though.

[Riwaka]

Truck noise - best hope for the future would be for Costa Rica to import many Chinese specification trucks with Voith hydraulic retarders. 

The aquatarder is a smaller & lighter unit that uses engine coolant.
https://voith.com/corp-en/braking-systems/retarders-trucks/voith-aquatarder-swr-lkw.html
Voith Retarder Animation Function VR 115 CN (Voith hydraulic truck retarder as used on Mercedes , Volvo , Isuzu etc) on the back of the transmission.
https://youtu.be/v-ZxNz90sL8?si=RsK8u_tmggWFrnfg

Scania's retarder is similar. 
https://www.scania.com/au/en/home/about-scania/newsroom/news/2024/scania-is-changing-the-game-for-tasmania-s-logging-industry.html

Jake Brake, video claim - 'with new emissions technologies, the sound of the Jake brake is all but eliminated."
https://youtu.be/HkfjCJClWVA?si=Wr4ogB7_

[barbender]

Those retarders are very interesting, I hadn't heard of those before, Riwaka.

[Resonator]

Oh the sound of a Jake brake, for an old school trucker it's like singing the song of my people.

Like has been said, a lot has to do with the exhaust set up. What the truck has for mufflers and whether it has straight pipes. The trucks I drove were mostly fleet - spec. trucks and had stock exhaust. They weren't all that loud, and I used the Jake's as much as possible. I always figured I wanted as much braking ability I could get, and would rather be able to stop than worry about a noise ordinance.

[Jeff]

On the end of our property to the east, is us127.  This late winter and spring they have been working on the bridge out there that crosses southerland lake. On approach from both directions everything is deverted to the shoulder lanes where those rumble strips are.  Jake brakes are nothing compared to a major thorofare that is having every-single-stinking vehicle running up on, into over, out of and off those rumble strips.  After living in the U.P. for the majority of the winter where it is often completely silent for hours, this noise is brain rotting.

[thecfarm]

Maybe I was stopped at a rest area on an interstate highway. 
I heard those rumble strips for the first time, outside a vehicle, and you are right, they are loud!!!!

[teakwood]

we got used to the noise, but every little bit you can block with natural sound wave braking is welcome, hence the dirt wall and lots of bushes and trees growing there.

The new or newer trucks are very quiet, all european or asian brands use retarder/ intarder systems, in Europe we don't use the jake brake system since decades.

the problem here is, still lots of old, clapped out, 1mio miles trucks come down from the states to this part of the continent. they have the silencer rotten out and will not be replaced, then lots of truckers are real dumb asses here, drive reckless, overtake in curves, go up hill like snails, loud stinky driving. i have a down hill against my house, then two curves and a long straight (soft downhill grade) after my property and then a hill again. so some are so stupid and use the Jake brake all the way to the end of the straight and then need to gas up again to get up the hill again, that spends more fuel and is noisier than just let the truck go up that small hill with speed the truck already has.

the costarican trucks and drivers are not the problem, they have newer trucks and need to pass inspections yearly, are more educated in driving, most like a quiet comfortable truck, and are polite.

the problems are most of the Nicaraguan, Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Honduran trucks which haul a lot of products from our ports to their countries, poor countries, bad trucks, old clapped out vehicles without any inspection, noisy, bad brakes, overweight, not enough fuel in it or never do a diesel filter change, so they tend to brake down on the hills and in dangerous curves. throw trash just outside the window, very poorly educated persons, bad driving, we don't like them too much. overtired and fell asleep and crash or just flip their truck over the road shoulder. lots of times they are drunk driving.

we stopped a foreign truck driver from start driving of a restaurants parking lot, the guy was wasted. we told him if you start driving we get the police here real quick.

[Jeff]

Before we expanded our property we had woods where our polebard is now. In the beginning here, you could not tell the eway was even there. Neighboring land to our east and south was cleared over time and it got progressively worse. Putting up the barn helped a little.  The real cure for me is not to be here.

[aigheadish]

My barn just added echoes in weird ways. Neighbors talking is much more audible now, with the barn than it was without. Most noises used to just carry out over the land and now it bounces back some. It's generally quiet here but there is a highway about a mile north and I-75 is about 2 miles east and you can hear that if it's quiet. 

I like the idea of big dirt hills to shoot the noise into the sky... 

[barbender]

It's amazing how much of a difference temperature makes, too. That and leaf cover. In the summer, we can barely hear the highway traffic. On a -20° January night, it sounds like the road is right next to the house. You hear every crack in the road when cars hit them.

[teakwood]

Back to topic, did another 6 hours of dirt loading and hauling, almost done now. Won about 1000m2 (10700 ft2) of new flat ground behind the second woodshed, of which half can be used for buildings, the rest is green area or driveways. 


the outside area for the planer shavings is very nice too

[teakwood]

After having a nice flat clean area, rip that open again and make another mess. almost done now

big long ditch for water and electrical. lot more work to do the access boxes but i like them this way. clean and hidden  

[Magicman]

Most excellent!! 

[Old Greenhorn]

Nicely done. Probably the best benefit of burying the lines is that yo don't have to worry about them being taken down in ice storms and blizzards. I assume that's why you did it. Oh, wait.......

[aigheadish]

Good looking trench Ramon! 

[Resonator]

Good idea making junction boxes!