Ozymandias
on 08/11/2006 at 07:21 PM
O.K. I don’t know much about a lot of things, but construction is one thing that I know. To make this thing fly for $4.5 mil Turk-a-jerk is going to have to pile a large mound of dirt and apply a wery cheap stone veneer to it. Run a little under ground electric to back light his stained glass top and personal diaper flag, and call it good. And thats on the wag with minimal engineering and near slave labor, and come the next winters freeze the whole thing is going to crack up and look like shit.
Absolutely no fucking way he is building a 130’ tall, solid stone pyramid, for that kind of money. No fucking way! And by Oct 27th? BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Shit, I use 120lbs/cf to figure granite block and the costs vary wildly. If someone wants to calc the volumn of a 130’ tall pyramid use 110lbs/cf because the structure is not truly solid. There are joints, and hollow spots and such with laying up stone, and this stucture would probably be layed loose, no mortar. Also there are always Mechanical/Electrical chases and access ways in a structure this big that cut down your stone volumn. So 110Lbs/cf should work pretty good for a wag estimate.
So then, I don’t need to do the calc to know that there is a tremendous amount of weight bearing on the substrata. So unless he has 200’deep of solid bedrock right on the surface to build on, this dumbass is going to need a good geotech-engineer to determine his bearing conditions and a good structural engineer to get a foundation that will hold this bitch up. For a structure this big, out of solid stone, there goes your $4.5 mil, and you aren’t even designed out of the ground yet much less moving dirt or pouring a foundation.
What a fuck stick dumbass owner.
Anyway you get the point. FETE.
If it’s a pyramid with a 45 degree slope, then it’s volume is 1/6 of a 130 foot cube: (130*130*130)/6 = 316,166.67 cubic feet. He has an army of slaves to lower production costs I guess.
The part I don’t understand is how this “poor, desert nation” can be “energy rich” at the same time?? Guess they have lots of sunlight and hot springs?
Gee, the lucky Turkmen, to have thrown off the Soviet yoke to replace it with this ass clown. Maybe it was either him or the mullahs and this seemed the better choice.
I’ll take LC Geno’s word for it. I know next to nothing about construction. The numbers sound crazy. It’s obvious this tinpot dictator has no clue. Isn’t it funny - we give them billions of dollars for their oil and what do they do? Act like children. I hope our American contractors jump on this and get our money back.
I pulled out my old Walker’s Estimating Reference Book and looked up some stone costs on a couple of local vendor sites in Colorado. Bulk limestone weighs 150 to 165 lbs/cf. Uncut bulk limestone is costing $250 to $400 per ton for material only depending on the type of limestone you get. That is undelivered, not final shaped; you still have to cough up those costs in addition to the material costs.
So using Drew’s cf number I’ve got 316,166.67cf x 150lbs/cf = 47,425,000.50lbs. Divided by 2000 gives you 23,712.50 tons. Multiply by $250/ton gives you $5,928,125.06 material cost. Thats the cost you put out to call it yours but it is still laying on the floor of the quarry. Shipping and getting the stone shaped still has to be added. Walker’s says a nine man crew setting heavy cut stone using a crane can place 200cf in a eight hour day.
Using that production rate I get 316,166/200 = approx 1581 crew days. Thats 4 1/3 years for the one crew to get 316,166cf of stone placed.P.S. - my granite weight is way off, it is closer to 170lbs/cf.
Quick ‘net search: Turkmenistan is not the third world. It is the fourth or the fifth world at best. This country is a bunch of desert/steppe nomadic tribes who raise sheep and grow cotton, straight out of the 2nd century. Real live Conan the Barbarian country!! Interestingly, they have government regulated sunni islam; I guess they count as moderates?
Loads of oil and gas, which the government exports to Turkey, who pays them eventually. Limestone and persian carpet exports too. 60% of them are below the poverty line, 60% unemployment; that is the ones who aren’t starving to death: “In January 2006, Saparmurat Niyazov ordered to stop paying pensions to 1/3 (more than 100,000) of elderly people, cutting pensions to another 200,000, and ordering to pay the pensions received in the past two years back to the State. This has resulted in a huge number of deaths of old people, who may have had their pension (ranging from $10 to $90) as the only source of money.”
Guess we know where the $4.5 million came from huh? And since nobody has a job, and they have lots of limestone ... pyramids are limestone right? ... could this bit of news be Niyazov playing pharoah with a nation-wide make work project? I guess his 10-year prosperity plan isn’t working too well.
But how many Jewish slaves working for Pharoah will it take and can they get it done in 20 years before Pharoah dies.
Seriously, based on these figures it will take about five years to build and roughly $10-$15 million, not counting the stained glass doodad on top?
I’m still wondering if this fool has enough serious bedrock to support this crap. The weight figure LC Geno gave worries me. Especially since this is an earthquake zone (Central Asia).
Geno, if pharoah - I mean president - Niyazov put 1000 9-man crews on the job and at the quarry it would go faster? Seeing that the average wage there is a couple hundred a year, how much do you think local rock costs? “dirt cheap” or less?
This might actually turn out to be cool. Something they can be proud of. Something to tell the grandkids about on those cold winter nights, sitting around the dung fire drinking yak tea.
Skipper, the pyramid only has to stay up until Fearless Leader dies. But yeah, they have quite a few earthquakes there too. Hmmm.
Hey thanks, btw, for the impetus for a late night geography/social studies quest. Always good to learn something new.
Dung fire! Yak tea!
STOP IT! You’re killing me! BWAH-HAH-HAH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA ....
Here I sit pulling an all-nighter, upgrading 17 Oracle databases and you guys have got me giggling too hard to type.
Drew
AHHHHHHHHH - maybe, cost wise. Not by Oct 27 because you can only throw so much manpower at a job before they start walking on top of one another and become more a hinderance than a help. And I seriously doubt the costs can be kept either. Not if they intend to build a true permanent structure and take the construction seriously. Without writing a book in the comments, there is just too many other things going on to drive the costs up. They are talking sculptures, fountains, “gilded"(WTF-hope the gold foil is coming out of someone elses budget) bas-reliefs. This all suggests other multiple trades and hundreds of other cost items. I only touched on masonry because it is the biggest.
Turkey-muncher can control most of his labor costs, but only local materials. Because of the way multi-nationals work, his equipment will have to be bought on the open market at the going rate. With the equipment components being manufactured in twenty different countries, he can’t just buy the components from one source and start putting his own equipment together. Things like wire and pipe, electrical equipment, chemicals, etc, are all manufactured out of country and will have to be purchased at the going rate. Anything that is made up mostly of a specific commodity he will have to buy at the going rate even if Turkey-muncher manufactures the final product, things like copper electrical wire and such. Just to get the proper earth moving equipment, cranes, and materials handling equipment could eat that $4.5mil real quick.
You could go on and on with various costs that are out side of his control.The biggest problem this guy faces is keeping a structure like that from sinking. The reason you don’t see real large all masonry buildings in this country anymore has got to do with the structures weight. If you are not building on top of bedrock, a foundation system for a large masonry structure can cost you more than the rest of the building in total. There is a twenty story all brick building in Chicago that was built in the early 1900’s and was one of the last of it’s kind. The exterior walls are two feet thick at the top but are ten feet thick at it’s base and it sinks about a 1/4” to a 1/2” per year. The original ground floor is now about eight feet below street level. It is not leaning at all, it is still good and plumb, it is just slowly sinking straight down.
Anyway, blessings to you both its a beer and then bed for me.
Turk Bonker? He’s been entertaining the diplomatic community for a while now. One of the few public figures who can out nutcase Kim Jong-il without raising a sweat.
A year after he dies expect his body to be dumped out on the street for the dogs to scavenge. With live coverage by the local media.
“That’s right, Bob. The big mastiff has just torn off the left leg! With this unexpected turn of events the late President’s carcass may not last as long as previously thought.”
Ok, it must be something in the water over there. Turkmenistan is just north of Afghanistan and north of Iran. So, whatever it is catching. I agree Skipper, these people have lived waaaaaaaaaaay too long in the desert sun, in the 3rd century and under oppressive religious rules. Give them a few bucks and they act like stupid, look at me children.
I vote for a few well placed bombs - solve this problem once and for all. Might even help our economy if we either have to drill our own or drive down the price since we are the ones in control of the pumps.
