okay so more like 4 months at the beach, here are some pics from my current project. Its a 12' wide paved trail following an abandoned railroad grade. all the rail was pulled out years ago, ties were left, ive heard it was used up untill the 50/60's. its at the bottom of a 60-80' bluff, right on the water. numerous mudslides had buried the trail most of the way, if it wasnt a slide area then it was a washout, just a complete mess before we cam through, you could hardly walk it. The length is 4,000 feet with acces from one end and no turn arounds and one pull out about half way through, enough room to get one machine or pickup off to the side. The truck drivers can back in with their eyes closed I think. Hauled out 3,000 yards of dirt, 8,000 tons of shot rock for the base, and 3,000 ton of railroad ballast. Railroad ballast is to cap the shot rock base and give the water from the uphill side a way to drain as their isn't room for a ditch. 1. on the beach, all the trees we took out are to be placed on the beach and "anchored." this mess is before fixing the shore Armour and spreading the trees out 2. starting the beach work 3. Most of the rock they originally brought in was hand split granite like this, would be great rock for building walls 4. hdpe storm outfall, the diffuser tee was originally bolted to the upper flange in the pic, had a custom piece of hope made to extend it under the trail 5. had a minor slide and had to rent a long reach to place quarry spalls over the slide area. slide was caused by someones roof drains above not being connected and piped down the bluff, saturated the area and down it came, cleaned up 30 yards of soupy mud
Beautiful scenery, thanks for sharing. What kind of retainer wall is that in the last pic?
1.before and after retaining wall, they dont want to get engineering to go over 4' so i have to make it work. 2.another wall 3.only way to pass 4. pretty typical of what it looked like before. i think this was a washout between two slides. 5.nice bucket full of rocks
Redirock retaining walls, I really like working with them. This job was a pain trying to stage blocks, haul out material, and bring in the gravel for backfill when you only have a 12' wide road with water on one side and and a steep slope on the other. Oh and the city didn't want me to leave any vertical cuts over about 3' overnight.
Cool job. Looks like it was fun
Awesome work
That looks really good.
Looks like a fun job, nice work!
What's the end result - walking trail? I can see it being a PIA but fun at the same time. Your work looks spot on.:thumbsup
Yup it's a 12' wide paved walking/bike trail for the city. It's been a A fun PITA for sure. It's just been me and two truck drivers. Wish I would have taken more before pictures, was pretty busy at that point though. I cleared, hauled out dirt, and hauled in fill at the same time.
Amazing! You did a great job buddy.
Great job. Whatever they paid you, you earned it.
Finished spreading the 4" of crushed rock base, as you can see i used our "grader." 3,300' of 12' wide road Had to bring in a grinder, that is the access road, during construction the truck traffic destroyed the road for the nearby privately owned marina. City decided to grind in place, we will add rock as needed and repave.
fixed the sideways pics
Nice pics, cool job. Our grader is just like yours! Looks like you got an updated hyundai?
Yeah we picked up a 160-9, just hit 1,000 hours.
Really exciting video showing the truck drivers view for the last 4 months, I stopped just past the half way point. http://youtu.be/mRN0ie0754A
It shows for me that the video is private
link fixed
Nice looking work. Jobs like that are fun and challenging.
Wow that is a loooooong reverse for the trucks. Nice looking job and scenery to be on though.
little change of scenery this week, some clearing with the 115 kobelco first three pics are from the same spot, first one the makeshift landing area, that rock knob behind the trucks is about 20' high. the homeowner has plans to put a quarter million dollar telescope up on top. second pic is part of the area we are clearing. its pretty steep and all rock with a little bit of dirt, not much fun to walk the machine on. have to gather up what little dirt is there and build a road so you can get around. third pic is the view Last pic is just one of the bigger logs, thats a 3' bucket for size reference tomorrow ill put the grinder on the excavator and start grinding the slash, plan is to leave the stumps, kinda half ass grind the brush just to make it look a little better and call it good. the owner has no plans of using this area for anything, just clearing for the view.
had to do a little dental work on the grinder, had two teeth that were shot. second picture shows a tooth with ~100 hours on it. this is why we have an excavator mounted mulcher, skid steer would never be able to go the places i can take the excavator. this entire site was very steep, uneven and all rock with a tiny bit of dirt. need to plan your route because you cant push/pull yourself with the grinder on.
little before and after shot, about 12 hours of grinding, brush was pretty thick in some areas, and i ground down a few of the medium sized stumps. you can mulch the brush up finer than what i did here but this is not the ideal ground for that. suprisingly i only trashed one tooth on this job, they hold up fairly well to rock. thats the log pile after taking one load out yesterday, pile on the left will be mostly firewood, figure we can get one more decent load of logs from the pile on the right.
Looks great Tyler! What brand grinder is that? How do you like the 115?
Grinder is a fecon. Overall I Like the 115, its not the smoothest machine. In my opinion build quality is a bit low, and parts are very expensive. I like how quick it is, and it has decent power for its size. Obviously no tail swing is really nice. I dread having to work on it, but that's to be expected with a zero tail machine. We picked it up really cheap a few years ago. A local guy bought it new he only put around 400 hours on it so it was damn near a new machine when we got it.
That does look steep. I noticed some serious rock in the one shot. Not sure how you got that aerial shot but it's a good one.
Nice looking work with the mulcher. What a pain with all those rocks and rough terrain. Our Tigercat would be useless on a job like that. Man I hate changing the teeth on ours. I bought a 1 inch drive ratchet so I could put a 4 foot pipe on it. Do you have trouble with your teeth moving away from the backers. If I hit something hard like live oak, a few of them will have a gap behind the tooth.
Areal shot was taken from the top of the rock in the first picture at this site, it's a good 35-30 feet above the parking area, probably 100' above where a lot of the clearing was. We are in the process of building the guys house on the adjoining lot. It was a fun one. Had to blast For the daylight Basement, had a 15' cut in rock. I'll see if I can find some pictures, it's a monster of a house.
Yeah changing teeth is no fun, I've been using a 3/4" drive breaker bar and a cheater pipe. Use a 1/2" ratchet with 3/4" adapter to get them snug. Broke one of the cheap HF sockets the other day, time to get some nicer tools. I haven't noticed our teeth moving, sometimes when I hit a stump wrong it will stop the drum dead In its tracks but haven't noticed any movement.
I have a few jobs coming up and I have to change teeth. I will try to take a picture of what I am talking about. We have 48 teeth on ours, how many on yours?
It only has 18 teeth! I changed them by all a while back and just that took about 3 hours
Mate, I used to have that problem a lot and the only fix I could come up with is when I put a new set of teeth on they get new bolts and nuts and tighten them to about 1000ftlb. Most of the cause of them coming loose is free wheeling the rotor backwards to clear a jam. An outfit over here has made a different tooth holder which stops the teeth moving altogether. You've done a great job Tyler PS sorry about hijacking the thread
Don't worry about hijacking, open discussion about this industry is what this place is for. How many hours are you guys getting from a set of teeth on average? This is only the second full set we have put on. Doing some gabion basket retaining walls this week, they look neat but talk about a labor intensive slow process. They are mostly just a decorative feature at a custom home we are working on so they gotta look good. I'll get some pictures tomorrow.
Thanks Tones. Makes sense on the teeth and bolts. We use new bolts every other change. I use a 1 inch ratchet and a pipe to tighten them. I have re tightened them once they moved from the backer and have had it happen again but I have also tightened them and have it be ok.
I have gotten up to 200 hours on the double carbides and 100 on the chippers but you know as well as I do the more stuff you hit the worse it is. I think you have it worse than us, concrete and rock seem to do more harm than steel and you have plenty of rock.
I can get 3-500 hrs on Fecon doubles depending on the ground conditions. At the moment I'm using an after market tooth which has one big single tile. They can handle working in granite country and can last up to 1500 hrs. The big problem is to buy more the minimum order is 300 and I won't live long enough to use them all.:Banghead
couple different jobs here, first couple are just a driveway i prepped for concrete, had to pull some curb and sidewalk to make the driveway approach wider. third picture is just the side yard, i graded around the whole house and prepped a patio underneath a deck that didnt get done at backfill for some reason (i didnt backfill) did everything with the hyundai 55. last two are getting started on some gabion basket walls just down the street from the other house. working under a deck again, but i lost the small machine so i had to cram the 140 in there to fill the patio, worked out alright.
here are some shots of the almost finished gabion walls, the first wall is 4.5' x 18', the terraced walls are 6', 9', and 12' all 3' high. this is the first time we have ever done these and, that represents 3 days of work for me and one other guy, had to hand stack the face rocks in each basket, front and back on some of them. Homeowner saw these online (im guesing pinterest)and had to have them. think they turned out pretty nice, will look pretty awesome once the house is finished, house has a lot of unconventional siding and is going to have a sort of industrial/commercial look . got a picture of my tilt bucket too, this one is pretty narrow but the price was right
Nice work Tyler. Did you have to make the baskets or were they pre-made? Sometimes I miss the residential work.
Everything is pre cut and mostly put together, you just have to fold it up and stitch the sides together, really simple. they come like the picture Funny you miss the residential work, I dont really like it much . It's just kinda blah, boring. would rather be developing land, doing some commercial or municipal work, larger scale jobs. We Work on a wide range of projects, so it tends to keep things interesting.
I said sometimes..lol. Grew up in the residential business running Bobcats cleaning up, backfilling and grading. When I turned 16, I was turned loose with a F350 and 853 skid to go around to all the projects. Finishing up an auto parts store and working on a new fast food joint now. Landed a demo of a retail end cap at a large mall with rebuild and an outparcel build at the same mall last week for a cell phone provider. Bidding a condo project that's residential but technically it's commercial. It's all site work - demo, grading and storm.
Great photos and a cool video