Saturday there was snow in the big bowl. I heard that it was dry on Sunday. I went Monday afternoon. Nice sunny afternoon but the park was wet everywhere the sun didn’t hit. It was mostly unskateable. Smay went to West Linn and found the same thing. I skated the pipe for a while, then I went to get a weedburner. I wasn’t going to get shut out like that again.
Well this morning was very misty but I figured I’d give it a try. When I got there, everything was very wet. Stupid to even try to dry it but I figured I’d check out the tool anyway. Both the dudes who were supposed to help me crapped out, so I spent 45 minutes there seeing what I could get done on my own. I found a nice push-broom and pushed some of the water around. Then I dragged it with towels. Then I got the burner going. I wanted to make sure not to do any damage so I took my time and dried the area shown in about 20-30 minutes. Pretty cool to see that water just evaporate away after a few passes. I figured I’d at least dry out the problem area from yesterday so people could skate later. I had a rope that was long enough to haul the propane bottle out of the bowl and the pipe was dry, so I had no problem getting in and out myself. The whole experience was eerily like my old Beaverton Ramp days when I would stop on the way to work to squeegee the ramp so it would dry in time for the noon session.
In the end it was wasted effort because when I got there at 4:00 the whole place was dry. Shawn Rheinert told me that burners could be hard on the concrete and that he had seen concrete in Colorado parks cracked by people doing that. We probably don’t want to try it if it’s really cold out. Fun tool to play with though. The handle is a little short even for a short guy like me. Maybe when you’re burning weeds you don’t need to get the nozzle very close to the ground.
$20 for the nozzle on sale from Harbor Freight. I used the propane tank off my barbecue.
This is pretty much the rig.
2 comments
Kilwag (k.ed)
Let’s see the whole rig.
chompy
Thanks for the effort you put into drying it! I could understand why it might be bad for the concrete with the expanding/compressing due to the temperature change. But you can tell it would help on those days when it’s mostly dry with a couple patches of wet.