Hot water and 1% NCA

If you know what this means, you must be a concrete monkey! Hot water and NCA is what you put in concrete to make it get hard faster. NCA is Non Calcium Accelerator. Concrete gets hard because of heat. It's called hydration. When concrete is made with hot water, it makes it set up faster. When you add in some NCA, it gets hard even faster. Since it was cold today, we decided we'd just help the mud along a bit. We really hate it when the concrete just sits there. It's like a great gray mass that jiggles with laughghter every time we check to see if it's getting hard. A smug little mud pie sitting there doing nothing while we dither. Well, not today.

We have been in the office mostly for the last couple of weeks, waiting on the big job to start. As a consequence of sitting on our ever widening asses for a few weeks, we are not in finishing shape...or much of any shape but round ;) We opted to do half of what was set up for a couple of reasons. First, we have been sitting around eating like it was our last meal for weeks. Second, because the mix design that was already approved came from a different concrete company, we were unsure of how the mud would be. We didn't want to get an ass kicking on our first pour. Aren't we the clever ones? Yes, we are. Cutting this pour back was the smartest thing we have done in a long time. The hot water and NCA did their job. We had poured out, and just finished edging all the pours when we decided that it wasn't just drying out on top, this shit was getting hard. When Bill says "this is getting hard", that is code for "I am gonna work your ass off", or alternately, "we are gonna get our asses kicked". Personally, neither of those options is very appealing to me. I am allergic to hard work, and my butt doesn't appreciate being kicked.

This being our first pour on the job, and our first time working for this particular company, we were determined to make a good first impression, so we kicked it into high gear. Well, Bill and I did. The rest of our crew pretty much wandered around aimlessly, or pretended to work, far away from where the actual work was going on. This is normal for us actually, so it wasn't a huge deal, but I digress. Just so you know, today's pour was actually four pours. They were three foot wide three sided tree rings. We had to run back and forth between the pours, doing all the things we had to do to make it ready to stamp. We managed to keep enough ahead of it to get it all stamped. It actually ended up being a very good first day, and the stampwork looks great.

Tomorrow we have a very similar pour on another job. We are replacing some work we did a few years ago. This job is for a bank. We had put stamped work around three sides of their building, and the city tore out all the stuff on two sides when they widened the street. The bank insisted that the replacement concrete match what was there before. We found this very amusing because the company we are working for is our competition, but they don't have the tools needed to match our work. Nobody does. Hee hee! Sucks to be them. Needless to say, we decided to take the NCA out of the pour tomorrow. We both feel like someone ran over us and then backed up so they could do it again. We don't want to have to work at warp 9 two days in a row... Damn it sucks to get old. My brain is stuck on about 19, but my body tells me in no uncertain terms that it is not amused, and is old. I'm off to get a couple of tennis elbow straps and a new wrist brace. At least tomorrow is Friday. Oh and next week, they are predicting "winter precipitation" all week. Hot damn! Another week to eat! Woot!