Yair . . . For going on eighteen months we have been putting up with a drainage/widening/resurfacing project on the Bruce Highway, the main north/south route along the Queensland coast. Progress is painfully slow. The whole project is being done with excavators and I can't really see the point in having a twenty five ton excavator cutting grade with the gps while half a dozen trucks are waiting. Fair dinkum, it drives me nuts. there are a couple of little cuts outside of town that two ex's and a dozen trucks have been working on for three weeks that I reckon I could have roughed out with a D8 and had ready it for repegging and the grader in a couple of days . . . we used to bulk it out and stack it out of the way and load it out later with the Hough or a Scoopmobile---four passes to a tandem tipper. They also spend hours stripping and windrowing topsoil with an excavator. Even a little D6 with an angle blade would do it in a fraction of the time . . .with maybe a couple of clean up passes with the grader. What's going on? What's this pre-occupation with excavators? I should add I have nothing against ex's, it's just that I don't see them as being cost effective on some applications. Is this just me missing something or is there more to this story? Cheers.
See what you aint been retired no time and already wanting to work
Is this an hourly no bid contract? What do the soil conditions look like?
same on this side of the ditch; scrub. We have a whole generation of engineers and paper shufflers that think bulldozers are old technolgy and diggers are do all and end all. And as for tractors and scoops,ive given up trying to tell some of these idiots that they are the best way to move dirt on some sites. But when we win a contract on price there eyes open abit wider. trouble is alot of county jobs just go to there 'prefferd contractor' and we don,t get a look in. case in point pushing up sand on a beach using a 10 ton digger and bobcat. My bloody old D4D would have eaten both of them for half the price.
It's not just Queensland. We've got a single to dual lane upgrade happening here on the Sth Coast NSW. You could barely walk 5 metres on the site without running into an excavator of some size, from 2 tons to 35 tons. One of the biggest wastes of time it seemed to me was using a 10-12 ton excavator to build low bund type walls along the edges of most the road site, approx, 2-3km. Scooping soil up from the worksite the excavator was on, it would make a low embankment about 18 inches high and about 6 foot wide and then pack it down with the back of the bucket. This no doubt expensive and time consuming process went on for over a week and then the bank was covered with geotextile. A small dozer could have done the job better in a quarter of the time and a fraction of the money. And although there is potential for using a scraper for mass excavation of the cuts and fills, so far they're just using dozens of trucks & dogs and one or two ADTs all filled by the myriad excavators on site. A similar situation occurred further south from here on a massive rock cutting. Virtually all the rock was removed with 30 to 50 ton excavators with hammers. No explosives at all. The rock was hard and stable but for good measure it was lined when finished, with wire mesh and shotcrete. The whole job took many months of painstaking chiseling. Would be wary of buying those excavators secondhand. I'm not anti excavator but it seems on so many jobs they dominate to the extent that they end up doing everything and not just what they are best for. My 2 cents, AusDave
You've made the mistake of importing too many of our site managers, q.s's, etc. First question; what size excavator do we need for this job? Over here tracked loaders don't get a look in on many jobs where they would be ideal. Medium dozers still get a look in, though, but D3/D31 size, hardly any left.
Yair . . . thanks for replies fellers. It's comforting to know I'm not the only one to see a problem. It probably has something to do with this "prefered contractor" syndrome that is creeping into government vocabulary . . . I guess anyone can bring a job in on time and under budget if the numbers are loaded on the bid. Cheers.
What ever happened to building a detour around the work site to keep the traffic moving .I went down the "highway ?????" from gladstone to Gin Gin a couple of weeks ago .150 Kms usually takes one and a half hours to travel . This trip took three hours . Seems to be more traffic control people than workers on the job .
Yair . . . ianoz . Yes mate, that's the section I'm on about. We're seven kay south of Miriam Vale and for 12 months or so it was taking half an hour and two set of lights to get into town. Crazy stuff. Cheers.