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Winston

lid wrote:

(...)

Can you burn the wood posts (maybe with gasoline) out of the concrete?

I kinda doubt it because of all the water, though
to be honest, I have not tried it. I expect that the
wood would act as a wick and merely draw water from
underneath as it steams off the top.

Do the posts go all the way through the concrete, i.e., after burning
out the posts you will be left with a square hole all the way through
the concrete?

Yup. I'm sometimes left with the world's ugliest, stalest, biggest
donut. Normally burning isn't necessary, as the rotted wood *does*
come out of the hole in pieces, with a little convincing.

If so, you could probably find some square steel tubing that will fit
in the hole and fabricate your own "toogle bolt" type of device.

Yup. I was thinking of an internal 'scissor grapple' that would
tighten against the inside of the square hole as lifting force was
applied for those rare instances when I have a 'complete'
footing to remove.

Just
put it in the hole of the concrete so that its spring loaded "toogles"
will flair out on the bottom side of the concrete block and yank out
the block with whatever lifting force you want to rig up to this
gadget.

Most often, I'm left with a few teensy tiny concrete rocks or a
leetle concrete ring. There normally isn't a lot of area to grab.
So the challenge is to find a hand tool that'll generate the couple
hundred lbs of force necessary to grasp and pull little shards out
of the clay a couple feet below grade. My slate bar is a champ for
loosening this stuff up, for example.

--Winston