It’s cold in the winter in Saskatchewan. People find all sorts of things to occupy themselves in the dead of winter. Ten years ago or so, Joe in Saskatchewan had a little cave-in in his basement, and decided to clean it up with has radio-controlled miniature excavation and earth-moving equipment. Then he decided to keep going:

Early August of 02 it rained 8″ in 7 days and I had forgot to replace the eave extension on the NE corner of the house after cutting my grass the wk or so before. Alot of moisture soaked up in the NE corner of the basement & a month or so later a big chunk of the dirt wall fell off & was strewn acoss the floor, partially blocking the entry way into my water well.

I got started in this radio controlled heavy commercial hobby in the Spring of 97 with a Tamiya King Hauler & flatbed trl. By the time of this “cave in” in 02 I had aquired a bulldozer & trackhoe rc models from Germany & worked away at cleaning up this mess with them during the winter months when things are slow on the farm. I trucked the dirt to another corner of the basement, out of the way.

I found it to be great entertainment & after getting all of it cleared away…. well…. then there was just another mess in the other corner of the basement. LOL I had to do something with it & I also thought I’d better crib the walls with wood to prevent any future cave-ins that could affect the foundation. While I was at it, I thought I’d make the area down there a little larger too by trimming back the dirt walls a couple of feet & when it’s finnished a couple of yrs from now, then I’ll pour a cement floor too.

It’s been a great hobby thus far, dreaming up – building all sorts of different minature equipment from kits or from scratch for this “mining” project. If it wasn’t for this mining project I probably would have lost of interest in this hobby by now b/c once the models are built – the novelty of how they work & perform would wear off with no task to be accomplished them.

I have a yellow dump trk (Tamiya Mammoth) and I trucked dirt out of the basement, approx 2 cu yds the summer of 05, up a wooden ramp 16″ wide, most of that dirt being what had originally fell off the wall to begin this excavation.

The summer of 06 I built a 4″ belt conveyor & moved out over twice that amount. And so far I’ve only accomplished mining the east wall. The south wall (longer part of the house) has nearly twice the material to be mined away. I won’t be finnishing this “project” anytime soon.

There’s dozens of additional videos of Joe Dirt here. Joe’s my kind of videographer. There’s no bad music and no narration. All action. Go, Joe!

(The Borderline Blog for Boys digs Gerard Van der Leun for sending that one along)