Digging in Rock Hard Clay

In the vain hope that this saves some other poor bugger a broken back or simply a lot of sweat and pain, I offer up this small piece of advice for digging in hard clay:

Buy a cheap and not-so-nasty Rotary Hammer Drill. Also purchase an angled wide chisel for same. Gloves, Eye Protection and Earmuffs are also mandatory.

Use that to shatter apart the clay and break it up.

This solution was suggested to me over coffee by my then contract account manager (ie Pimp, in Contractor's Parlance) about a year or two ago.

When swinging a mattock bounces off the ground, this is the only way to go. And then some.

The straight down/flat chisel works, but I found tends to embed itself in the clay too easily, and is a complete bugger to remove. The angled one seems to handle nicer. For me. YMMV.

I've tried the basic mattock. I've tried the soak the ground trick. Works, but very heavy and mucky. And not so good anymore, when you're in the middle of the worst recorded drought in 100 something years.

Gypsum? Don't make me laugh.

This method with the jackhammer is not easy. It is, however, easier. Particularly compared with an angle-grinder sharpened mattock.

Regular readers may thus deduce that my relative quietness and lack of activity RE: AWFFull, lately is due to

(a) daylight savings time starting across most of Australia. and
(b) Steve going flat out to try and get all three decks built by Christmas day lunch with sister-in-law and partner. No guesses for who made that request.

1 down. 2 to go. 36 Degree heat makes it hard hard going.

We had our Garden designed by Neil Hobbs and Karina Harris about a year or three before Corbin was born. Consequently all work was stopped for some time. Bit here, bit there. Most of the major works are now done. Old deck dissassembled about a month ago. (Gawd was that shoddily made. I'm seriously surprised it didn't fall apart underneath us! Nail gun'ed *everything*. Joists, bearers, boards, stairs. You name it, it was probably nail gun'ed.)
Finished the first deck last weeked. Am rapidly getting the base of the 2nd built. But digging the holes for the posts is (was...) not easy. The ground is *solid*. Jackhammering "dirt" apart is way outside my previous experience of digging in the ground.

Corbin's been having a great time trying to smash the removed clods of clay against the house. Keyword: "trying". The clods are generally winning that one. That may give you some idea of just hard hard this stuff is.

I'm finding it curious that the concreting to fill the holes back in is so much easier than creating the holes in the first place. Curious? Depressing more like...

In any event, if this article saves just one person pain, then the 20 minutes to type this in was well spent.