I don't even consider myself a Dozer Operator, but I'll post these pics here. I spent Sunday thru Tuesday running a JD850K dozer. Friend of mine owns a JD850Kwt. He got a job building a pad. The land owner has a 850 but no operator. So I got hired on to run his dozer. Ryan is smooth as a '47 Chevy in a Dozer seat. I'm not. I can run one and that's about it. I'm a Blade man. The blade is in the wrong location on this thing...... The job was to build a 500ft x 450ft flat pad. The owner is going to construct two buildings on the site. A 50x100ft. And a 60x300ft. Ryan put a 1 foot drop North to South on the pad. We finished yesterday but I forgot to get a good pic of the completed project. I've gotta go back down there in a couple days so I'll try to remember to get a pic then. I pulled a Sheep's Foot part of the time. Most of the time was double pushing beside Ryan.
We started on a bald T shaped ridge mainly running North to South. About 2ft drop toward the South. When we were done we had fill at all four corners with a little in the middle of the West side and none in the middle of the East side. The deepest fill was 8ft at the Southwest corner.
Nice work! How are ya'll carrying grade? Laser, GPS, hubs..lol? 500x450 is a big pad.
yes that is a big plane to create. 1' over 450' is a pretty shallow slope. That stuff looks like quite a bit of clay content I love doing the double pushing stuff.
I was just the grunt, Ryan was the master. We just eyeballed it until we were within 4" or so. Then set flags wherever we were at grade, 8 or 10. Then cleaned to those flags. I can "see" grade fairly well having finished several pads with a grader and thousands of hours of grading roads. But I don't have the finesse to finish with a dozer. At the end Ryan would haul ass across the pad at 3 mph or so skimming it smooth. I bragged on him and he humbly said "I've watched you do that with a grader before and thought the same thing". Then I dragged a wheeled box blade around behind a tractor for a couple hours.
3 or 4 inches of top soil, then Missouri clay. Had good moisture content and packed well in the filled areas. In a couple spots it bordered on too wet. After the owner gets his buildings done I'll go back and push the top soil up onto the pad and spread it.
I've double pushed using the grader alongside a Dozer several times. Triples or quadruples the amount of dirt in a long push.
I've only done it a couple of times, it was 2 loaders. We were pushing out a pond at a mobile crusher, just one push. One machine would probably get next to nothing it was so watery. The bottom was hard so no chance of getting buried. One push then a lot of cleaning!