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The steel studs arrived on Tuesday July 1st, stacked nicely at the end of my driveway… It looks like only one of the 9ft studs was damaged (see the inset), but I had anticipated some loss and ordered extra studs, so no problem.
My wife (Sherri) and I went out there for a few hours on Wednesday and got the first corner with 10 studs up. I had bought the self-tapping screws, but my drill couldn’t drive them into the 20 gauge steel, so I was forced to alternate my single drill between the drill bit and the Phillips driver. Other than the poor tool situation, we were pretty happy with how easy it was to get the studs in and plumb.
We had one issue after we put in a stud where the track was only fastened by a single screw. We got called away (by my skid steer being delivered) and by the time we got back, the wind had blown it over and bent the track… From then on, we always made sure that every stud was well connected to a piece of track that was well connected to the footing right in the same section.
Then on Thursday, my brother-in-law, John R, used up another one of his vacation days to come and help out. John started by fixing the “stairs”, which was a mixed success initially, but now, after some repairs and settling in, are pretty helpful.
I brought my second cordless drill so we could use one to pre-drill and the other to drive the screws in… I also found that my hammer drill (connected to my generator and run in “drill only” mode) had a lot of power for easy drilling. We worked together and made pretty good progress. By the end of that day, we had raised most of the 9’ studs and a couple rows of metal lath to help tie it all together.
My biggest concern was that the metal lath was not lying flat. It would look fine to start, but then later it would bow in or out. Clearly we were doing something wrong (we figured it out, mostly, on subsequent days ;^).
At 6:00, we quit and started playing with the skid steer. I moved some of the big boulders down to the bottom of the driveway and scooped some soil to put in front of the steel shipping container (we had quite a step down because we had jacked it up to make it level). Along the way, we found a couple problems. The skid steer really tears up the sand and, in the process, wastes most of its power. It has two new tires, but they are in the front (probably because it is easier to change the front tires on a skid steer). The back tires (where I need the power during digging) are pretty bald…
However, I don’t think new tires will be enough of a solution. Instead, it looks like I may need to get some “Over the Tire” tracks (OTT), and those are pretty expensive. So far, used ones are hard to find and new ones cost 25% to 45% of what I paid for the Skid Steer. Another issue is that the right throttle doesn’t seem to work as well as the left, especially in reverse. Skid Steers are like a tank with each side driving forward or backward based on pushing that lever forward or backward. If one side doesn’t keep up properly, it makes it a bit tricky to drive straight. I will get my Dad to take a look when he comes down to help out the 3rd week of July.