I really like these aluminum flarable monuments. We flare them and dig a hole and carefully backfill them in there but they can be driven too. I hauled the stones in a lath bag from a seasonal ravine a few hundred feet away. Closer:
The cap:
JDSF is Jackson Demonstration State Forest. The story is a little complicated. In the 1960s the State claimed to a north-south centerline several hundred feet west of here. Adjoiner's surveyor (Glover) set a steel pin on the centerline 13 feet from here. Adjoiner (Thompson) won the first trial and the State won the appeal. The adjoiner hired another Surveyor for the second trial in 1972 (Joos). Joos's survey substantially agrees with Glover's survey except that he moved things a little resulting in Glover's pin being 13' off of the adjudicated boundary. Therefore to reduce confusion, I set a monument on Joos's version of the north-south centerline (the line that the State agreed to in the out-of-court settlement). Forester's, when flagging timber harvest boundaries, tend to use the monuments that are out there so if there is a monument that is not a monument anymore it is best to give them a monument to use.
Nice
That looks like a CDF cap, no? Is that still legitimate in the CalFire reign?
Don
Yes, that is the official department name.
Cal Fire(R) is a short name like Caltrans (Department of Transportation) and California State Parks.(Department of Parks and Recreation).
Interesting cap. I don't think I've seen one on which the agency name reads counter-clockwise before.
> I really like these aluminum flarable monuments. We flare them and dig a hole and carefully backfill them in there but they can be driven too.
I have to wonder whether galvanized pipe with cast iron caps would be even more permanent and cheaper. The aluminum is relatively light and easy to stamp, but how fire resistant is it (probably the wrong question to ask an agency tasked with preventing such fires) and how attractive to collectors?
Dave-
to hi-lite the lettering, do you just give it a shot of paint and wipe off excess?
It definately improves readability.
> to hi-lite the lettering, do you just give it a shot of paint and wipe off excess?
> It definately improves readability.
I'm not Dave, of course, but, yeah, that's what you do. It's a good idea to take along a small can of more permanent enamel instead of using day-glo marking paint, if you want the highlighting to last.
yeah I know, I don't which way to mark them. Either way they kind of look backwards but I settled on what you see in the photo.
It's also stamped with all letters outwards. All three companies I checked allow you to stamp letters in or out how you want them. So you can have "CALIF DEPT OF" on the top and "FORESTRY AND FIRE PROTECTION" on the bottom, for example. They also allow more rows than 1 but I like having plenty of space to stamp on there. But I inherited these so I will use them until we need to order more.
My former employer had a huge box of 2" galvanized pipes with matching brass caps. those made nice monuments but they require at least quickrete or concrete to set. I wouldn't use cast iron on the coast, it would be a rusted unreadable mess in a few years.
These aluminum monuments (which we have several boxes ordered by someone before my time) are lightweight, easy to carry half a mile over rough, slash covered terrain to its final resting place. I'm hoping the aluminum performs well in the coastal environment; certainly iron pipes get covered with rust but I haven't seen one that was ready to disintegrate or anything like that.
Our crews in the 1960s set 4' long 4"x4" concrete monuments in some pretty remote places but they had a lot more people to carry them too. I would go for those if I could. We have many of those set by Frank Lermond, LS577, in the 1930s that still look almost as new as the day they were set.
Yes I expect the flo-orange paint will wash away in a few years. If I thought a little further ahead, our red tree paint would probably last for years. I came across one cap that was coated in the 80s with yellow tree paint and it was still there. Unfortunately they didn't wipe it off which annoys me.
> Our crews in the 1960s set 4' long 4"x4" concrete monuments in some pretty remote places but they had a lot more people to carry them too. I would go for those if I could. We have many of those set by Frank Lermond, LS577, in the 1930s that still look almost as new as the day they were set.
For some reason, I have the idea that a cubic foot of concrete weighs about 80 lbs. I suppose I could cheat and look on the web, but, assuming I'm close, that would put a 4"x4"x48" monuments at under 40 lbs, which sounds packable by one person. The biggest expense would be the time and labor to cast the monuments, I'd think.
I think concrete is closer to 150 lb.s per cubic foot which would equal about 67 pounds for a 4' monument.
> I think concrete is closer to 150 lb.s per cubic foot which would equal about 67 pounds for a 4' monument.
Yes, after all these years with the idea that a bag of readymix would make about a cubic ft. of concrete, the internet tells me otherwise. I'd think about increasing the portland cement ratio and reducing the cross-section of the monument to 3.5" x 3.5" or less.
Dave,
I think about 6 more trips to the ravine for rocks would be a good thing. Especially if the rocks are about 2 to 3 times larger. I see no sweat on your face, nor expressions of back pain. Where's the agony of the labor that is usually associated with any birth?
But they are fun to set, aren't they?
Hey Dave, thanks for posting, very cool. At the risk of being a negative nelly, I am suggesting that you stamped it upside down.
That is for special upside down Surveyors 😉
> That is for special upside down Surveyors 😉
Your messin with my mind Dave, can I borrow the tin foil hat!
I like the paint highlighting. I've used plenty of the Aluminum monuments, but never highlighted the lettering like that. I'll have to try that on some of the spare caps I have in my collection of leftover caps in the garage. (I sawed these caps off a bunch of Berntsen drive-in monuments for my employer when we re-capped them for later projects.)
As for the potential random theft of the aluminum monuments, if they are anything like the drive-in or break-away varieties that I have used in the past, it takes a post hole digger, and considerable effort to actually extract one.
