Winter Refurbishing

I always get asked what Superintendents do in the winter months... well in that light of that we spend our time doing tree work, equipment breakdown and repair along with reconditioning all of our course amenities.

Well even with these extremely cool temperatures we stay incredibly busy.  The past 4 days we have spent reconditioning our tee signs, ball washers and tee markers.  In this process all the old paint must be stripped off, power washed, and then hand ground back to the original stone or metal surface.  Then after much cleaning new primer and paint can be applied.  This is a very tedious process but I think we can all agree they will look fabulous for the 2014 golf season!

Ball Washers

Tee Signs

Finished Tee Markers

New Pump Station

Good Morning!

Well we finally finished up one of our large fall projects yesterday, the removal and then installation of a new Pump Station.  During this project we had a great deal of challenges and whoops to jump through but in the end we are very happy with the results.

This project started a few weeks ago with the delivery of a large extending forklift, both for the removal, the installation and the lifting of our intake pipe.  Our first whoop to jump through was with the intake screen, or more accurately the absence of our intake screen.  This is what it looked like:

Then we started the removal of the old station, did this using torches, and good old American muscle.  Once broken free we brought the forklift into place to lift out the canisters.  Luckily we rented a large enough forklift as these had to lifted straight up out of the roof.  This was a very stressful period as that was a lot of weight on the end of the machine but we got them out.  Last was hooking up and getting the old station completely out, here are a few photos showing the process, including one of the old valves next to the pumps with debris jammed in! (Notice the golf ball)

The next morning with a hard frost we loaded up the new Toro Flowtronics 1200 gpm pump station and started the slow and steady trip down through the golf course.  Once placed somewhat on the concrete pad we slowly maneuvered it into place. 

Additionally to the pump station we installed an entire new leg of our mainline coming out of the station, this included close to 100 feet of HDPE pipe installed by T&A Turf and Irrigation LLC.  T&A were a huge help throughout the whole process and aided me in the removal and installation.  A big thank you goes out to you all as we couldn’t have done it without your help!

And finally back to the intake screen… unfortunately we would have been 2 weeks out on one built from Flowtronics that still may not have fit on our retro intake flange.  So I went to the drawing board and designed one that matched what we needed and would fit on our intake pipe.  After taking the plans to a local metal shop the fabrication began.  Once complete myself, my assistant and crew got in a boat and headed out onto the lake in below freezing temps for the final install.  With unbelievable luck, all bolts lined up and after 9 hours over 2 days we had it installed and hooked up.

Here are a few final photos of the stainless steel intake screen designed by yours truly. 

We are very excited for 2014 and beyond with this new station as it will help considerably on keeping adequate pressure and flow throughout our great golf course!