Hello all, wondering if anyone knows exactly what this is. I have an old deed description that calls for pipes and I'm consistently finding this monument at the corners. I've seen these before and have never known for sure exactly what they are. What you see sticking out of the ground is a 1 1/2" diameter steel pipe but the top is closed off rather than open and has a small hole drilled in it.
On this job I ended up finding one that had been laid completely over on top of the ground and was able to get a look at the entire object. On the other end it looks almost like a gear shaft of some sort but I'm not sure.
Any thoughts?
That funny looking 4 sided end is a carbide bit for drilling rock. That size was probably used by a blasting company to drill and set dynamite for cracking rock.
Landbutcher is dead on. These ‘drill steels’ were run with compressed air hammer drills that also blew air through the hole running through the middle of the shaft, to clear the ground debris from the drill head.
I worked around a very large limestone quarry quite a bit and all the original property corners that hadn’t been mined thru yet were drill steels.
That makes perfect sense, I appreciate the replies!
Dig around it. May be a witness to the real pipe in the ground!
Surveyorjake has a valid warning there. Many clients are prone to set secondary monuments of their own that are more substantial or left higher above ground level.
Back in the 60s/70s, a surveyor in western Kentucky must have had a source for those as he set many of them as corners. There are some subdivisions he surveyed along Barkley Lake where, in addition to new corners, he even set one of those next to the existing Corps of Engineers monuments that already had existing witness posts. If the weeds are up and you sweep anywhere in the vicinity of it, they will certainly make a metal detector sing.
Drill steels were once commonly used as monuments in N ID. I find them on about 1 in 8 to 10 projects in rural areas.
The county seat of my home county is also known as the "Granite Capital of the World". There are many granite quarries in the area and that's what the use to drill in solid granite. Once worn down, many were used for property corners. There are also gangsaw blades that were commonly used for corners. They resemble scrape blades on a grader. Surveyors that haven't worked in the area before have a difficult time describing them correctly. It ALWAYS pays to dig around them as they may only be a guard for a rock or such.
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