In ,
micky typed:

In front of my house, someone needs to jackhammer out a piece of
blacktop 6 feet long by 4 inches thick, by 4 inches wide, I think
that would be good exercise but the only time I used an electric
jackhammer, I was tired in 30 seconds.

Do you think I can do this myself? In a full day's rental time?

Or can I rent a saw that does this?

This got buried in a different thread about digging out a crawl space, so
you may want to post it as a whole new topic.

Any chance that you could post a photo or two? Is the section of asphalt
that you want to cut out easily accessible and in an open area where any
type of saw or jack hammer could be used to get to it? From your
description, I am guessing that you just want to cut out a 4 inch wide strip
out of the existing 4 inch thick asphalt.

I would also be interested in knowing what the purpose of doing this is
(such as to put in a pipe etc. in the 4 inch trench), and if you will be
patching/replacing the asphalt after it is done.

If it is just about cutting out a 4 inch wide section of the asphalt, a
large circular saw does seem like it should work. The walk behind kind that
someone posted about may be fairly heavy and may need a pickup truck or
whatever to get it to and from the rental place. Depending on where you are
located, there may be a general tool rental place nearby, or even a
contractor tool rental place that also rents out heavy equipment etc., and
either one should have the walk-behind saw to rent if you wanted that.

If I were renting a circular saw to do the cut, I don't think that I would
worry about getting one that is a walk-behind type. It is such a short cut
(actually 2 cuts) that I would be fine if it meant kneeling on the ground
next to the saw while cutting. I don't think it would be heavy work, and if
it were me, I would just take my time and do it slowly on a cool day --
maybe in the morning.

Another option may be to just hire a handyman-type contractor to do the cut
with me paying for the saw rental if needed.

Or, I see concrete people cutting out old concrete (sometimes mis-poured
concrete) all the time. I assume that any one of those companies could do
that for you although they may charge more than a handyman-type person would
charge.

Or, maybe just post an ad on Craigslist describing the job as a "small job",
"cut out 4 inch wide strip of asphalt", etc. and maybe throw in a photo or
two. I could picture someone there saying they could do it for 100 bucks,
maybe even using their own saw.

It doesn't sound like a job for an electric jack hammer to me although that
may work. But lugging the jack hammer to and from the work site and lifting
and repositioning the jack hammer a bunch of times could be tedious.