Large excavator is onsite, (dozer tractor is dead)... Any tips or ideas on using my excavator to clear snow so trucks have access? Currently its Blowing and drifting... (1 foot of snow, drifts to 4-5 feet), need truck access to haul out grain out of bins. No good way to get my other dozer moved, as lowboy is snowed in at another location, and no tractor there. Do I take a trk in, then pull it out with the excavator multiple times to get into where I need to be? Do I dig the snow out ahead of time and pile it, like you would dirt? Do I try and just use the swing and brush the snow to the sides? Grab something with the thumb to be wider then my bucket, and pull the snow off to the side? Have patience and try to wait till the weather turns better? (Current forecast, doesn’t look like its gonna change for the better for a while) Anyone have ideas?
I used the swing method last winter. It took a long time. If you had a chunk of tall I beam to chain on the bucket about 4-5-6... feet long, that would make it much faster.
Something clamped in the thumb works best. Pulling the truck in and out usually ends up with broken stuff (don’t ask how I know!) lol. Not sure about the lay of the land but back in my farming days I got pretty good at understanding how the wind blew around our bins and other buildings and found places I could pile it that kept most out of the wind but didn’t leave a pile to melt and make a mud hole in the spring. It’s a **** job to push snow half a day to get a few trucks loaded just to turn around and do it again the next day. The way my farm was laid out I could push it all south to the road and never touch it again. My yard sat lower than the road and that area wasn’t needed for anything so I could build quite a pile and not bother the road or my ability to see coming out of my driveway.
I've got a 12ft snow blade off a tractor I grab with the thumb, works good for dry snow. Also done it with my 60" clean up bucket, digging and piling heavy wet dumps, I found using the swing you end up finding all the froze rocks, dirt clumps etc.. Not good for the boom or swing drive!
Update: having a plank, I beam or rail road iron would have been useful, but wasn’t onsite. The 6-8 inches, swinging back and forth worked ok. The deeper snow, pulling the drifts towards me, backing up and doing it again, got the snow packed enough, I could then scoop it up. Wasn’t as efficient as a dozer, but did get the job done.