More Power!

At last I found the solution to speed up removing the thinset - a pneumatic chisel! The only problem was, my air compressor had a hard time powering it for very long. I ended up taking 3 days off work so I could make some progress on the pool, so I decided to go ahead and spend the money and rent a better air compressor. Now it turns out my compressor wasn't that bad, just slower, so when my friend Todd offered to help out over the weekend, I picked up another chisel and an air hose and we both went to work. It's a good thing too, because between the two of us it took the better part of 3 days to finish removing all of the thinset and clean up.

The first day was plagued with several technical difficulties. Besides the requisite dozen trips to the hardware store, we quickly found that the $10 Harbor Freight air chisels (the only ones they had in stock) were good for about 30-60 minutes of work before blowing out. After going through 4 of them in 1 day, I ended up returning them and bought some decent Ingersol Rand chisels from Northern Tool - at $50 a pop! Still, it was worth it considering we would still be chiseling away if we didn't have them.

On Sunday afternoon, we finished the last bit of chiseling - a full hour before the rented compressor had to be returned! Then we spent the rest of the afternoon sweeping and vacuuming up all the debris, and finally hosed down everything to get rid of the dust. After 2 long weeks, all the prep work for the tile job was done, and we were finally ready to lay tile.