The Pier

I worked out a design for my pier and passed them on to my Father, who, while now retired, was a civil engineer for ~40 years. He reworked my pier plans and those drawings are posted as thumbnails below. I purchase 11 pieces of 10' x 3/8" re-bar and built the frame on March 27, 1999. I borrowed my Father's transit Easter weekend in order to accurately align the pier and building to North.

I used a metal cut off blade in my circular saw to cut the re-bar. It worked well. Bending was done by placing the re-bar in a 1" diameter steel pipe, with the bend point at the end of the pipe. A conduit bender was used "backwards" to give a sharp bend. After all the pieces were cut and bent, they were wired together in two sections. The two sections were then wired together.

I set up the transit during the late afternoon, making sure it was level. That night I sighted Polaris in the transit and locked the azimuth rotation. Bringing the transit down in altitude, I placed a stake in the ground about 30 feet from my position. With the stake under the transit, this gave me an accurate North-South line.

Once the hole was dug, the re-bar cage was placed in the hole. A level frame was built to hold the form for the upper part of the pier. Four 1" diameter rods, 36" long, were mounted 14" apart forming a square. These rods have a pitch of 14 threads per inch.

Sixty 80 pound bags of concrete was delivered to my house, and a concrete mixer was rented. My oldest son, John (and his dog Buddy) came over and gave me a hand. In about 3 hours we had mixed and poured 56 bags of concrete (4,480 lbs.).

I keep the pier moist for the next few days to keep it from curing too fast. After a couple of days I removed the upper form. A few voids are present in the corners from where the concrete was not packed good. Hopefully this will not cause me too much of a problem.

A couple of points that have come out during the planning of the pier that I had not considered:

The hole that is dug for a pier should have sharp edges between the sides and the bottom. If the edges are rounded, the concrete will rotate, or "dig" down in the hole - thus becoming unleveled.
One should take into account the "soil bearing load" for the pier. As shown, my pier will have a weight of 4450 lbs. with a footprint of 9 sq. ft. This gives a load of 494 lbs./sq. ft. This is an acceptable value for soil in my area. You should check soil bearing loads for your area before pouring a pier of this mass.

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