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How to make a lot level

As you can see a water level is the most popular low price solution. A few years ago I showed guy that was putting new siding on his house how to use a water level. He thought I was a genius for coming up with such a good method but I had to confess that it's an old trick probably a hundred years or more old. In old books I have seen them made by putting glass tubes in the end of an old rubber hose. The only real advantage of using a laser or transit is ease of use A pole barn or most residential building don't need any more accuracy than you can get from a water level

A good technique to actually do the leveling is to get an old bed spring and drag it back and forth.

Scp

Reply to
Stephen
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s/hundred/three thousand or more/

The Egyptians used water levels in laying out and constructing the pyramids, according to some fairly recent articles in archaeological journals.

Reply to
Mike Andrews

Where? Can't be any leaks. I'd love to see them. Or some key word to go by to find out what they where thinking.

Reply to
Sunworshiper

The Egyptians didn't have garden hose. They dug trenches, filled them with water, and measured off the water surface. For work too high above ground level to conveniently reference off water in a surface trench, they erected troughs or connected two basins with clay pipe.

Gary

Reply to
Gary Coffman

They didn't need tubing or hose to do it - All the Egyptians had to do was dig a network of trenches on the site they wanted level and fill it with water. Use a calibrated measuring stick at each reference point to transfer the levels to reference stakes, then dry out the trenches and start leveling.

Once you get the site fairly level, flood the plain a few times between scraping sessions to observe the low & high spots and correct them - you could get billiard-table flat with a little time and effort. (After accounting for the curvature of the earth, of course.)

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Reply to
Bruce L. Bergman

On Sat, 01 May 2004 21:31:29 -0400, Gary Coffman vaguely proposed a theory ......and in reply I say!: remove ns from my header address to reply via email

Hey! Run the level across this bit will ya! I need to work out deep a trench to dig!

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Reply to
Old Nick

That must have been a bit of a trick out in the middle of the desert!

Where did all that water originate?

Harry C.

Reply to
Harry Conover

Little thing called the Nile.

Reply to
Rich Jones

Maybe denial isn't a river in Egypt, but Da Nile is. :)

Really, they had to have had water for the workers to drink anyway, so they likely had enough extra around to set up a few bowl or trough levels.

Reply to
John Husvar

4000 years ago it was a lush green agricultural paradise. Today's desert (in the valleys of the pyramids at least) is some combination of natural events and poor farming, grazing and forest practices ...
Reply to
Bob Powell

It would have been, if they had built in a desert. But of course they didn't. The heroic architecture of ancient Egypt is found in the Nile river valley region of Egypt.

Realize that 4,000 years ago North Africa and the Middle East weren't mostly desert.The Sahara was a great forest. Lebanon was famous for its cedars. Babylon (Iraq) was a rich farming area. The Nile valley was the most productive farmland in the known world. Etc. Deforestation and climate change have turned many of these regions into badlands today, but it wasn't always so.

The white Nile rises from Lake Victoria in Kenya (even today the second largest fresh water lake in the world) and the blue Nile rises from Lake Tana in Ethiopia. Picture the lower Mississippi river valley minus the Corps of Engineers flood control dams, and you'll have a good image of what ancient Egypt was like.

Gary

Reply to
Gary Coffman

On Sun, 02 May 2004 17:25:49 GMT, John Husvar vaguely proposed a theory ......and in reply I say!: remove ns from my header address to reply via email

All the stuff left over by dead workers....

**************************************************** The Met Bureau is LOVE!
Reply to
Old Nick

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