Stella!!!

l to r: Narith, 'Stella', and Steve Forbes. at this moment, Stella buckles under the pressure.

we spent an afternoon fabricating a 12’ long, 2” diameter split spoon tube out of a pvc pipe cut longitudinally in half, then banded together with steel bands. the split spoon would core a sample of the soil by being probed into the ground using the bucket of the excavator to drive it down. we were uncertain if the pipe would be strong enough to probe through the unknown soil conditions, so we simply just had to take the risk. we invested a lot of sweat equity, and passion, into the creation, and joked that if the pipe were to simply burst into pieces during use, we would cry, “Stella….!!!!”, to express the pain of our loss.
Well, unfortunately, we hit a tough clay layer where Stella started to buckle under pressure. We weren’t able to probe any further than 0.25m when we started to hear a lot of cracking in the pipe. But, the good news is, the clay layer was a good discovery, as we had assumed worst soil conditions during design. We verified the clay layer by using the excavator to dig a ~10’ deep test pit, upon which we discovered a 1m layer of clay at the surface. Stella was demoted to being used as a measuring stick when taking photos of these test pits.

….Stella!!!!