What do you guys use for finish cleanup of demo debris. Historically we have used laborers and hand rakes but we are bidding a large job with 2 houses and 12 barns / out buildings and are trying to reduce labor costs since it is a prevailing wage job.
We use a compact track loader, (CTL). We have a grapple bucket and a regular smooth edge bucket. With a good operator, there is very little, if any, hand work to do, when the loader is finished.
A 953 or 963 track loader will be hard to beat on that job.
Excavator with a tooth bucket works good too. Do the houses have basements? If so there shouldn't be much laying on the ground to pick up at the end, if any of the barns have a concrete floor the same thing applies, knock it all in on to that and scrape it off of that.
For the final small debris clean up I prefer a CTL with tooth bucket or an industrial fork grapple.
I have a 953C, linkbelt 2700Q (34k lbs) and a Takeuchi TB290 that will all be on the job site. Since this job will be starting in November, I want to maximize the speed at which I can do each site. And being that I have to pay a laborer $60/hr to rake the ground, if I can get a new attachment and do it myself from inside the tractor in 1/2 less time I would greatly prefer that.
ASV RC 30 and grapple, load into dumpsters. Can outwork 5-10 manuel laborers, easy...
Everything is post and pier so the houses will be demoed onto the dirt. This is why I was thinking 6' or 7' skeleton bucket on a skid steer or our small excavator. Skim the top couple inches of dirt with the bucket quickly and the site is clean. The other structures are old barns, sheds, and garbage piles. This job covers a large 1000+ acre rance.
Grading/plaining bar on a ctl. Works like a giant rake. Use it all the time on clearing and demo projects.
Not sure what you mean by grading / plaining bar. You have a picture? I have a skidsteer mount adapter for the Takeuchi so if I could find a giant rake setup I could use that to rake the site clean.
Just search skid steer grading bar... Taking the time to scoop, sift, travel, dump. Bucket after bucket after bucket. Use the planing bar, fly back and forth pushing your debris to a gathering point or up to the hoe. If the surrounding area is grass you might wanna mow it and use a rotary broom. The one machine will do in 1 hr what 10 men in could do.
CTL with a skeleton bucket, and then use a junk piece of chain link fence as a broom to "sweep" the small debris. Works best if you have a grapple bucket to load out with , then grab up the fence and sweep up with it, drop the fence and pick up the pile to load.
be neat and clean don't scatter every where push it into itself and you shouldn't have much to cleanup
Best thing would be to have experienced track hoe operator that has some time working with demo material. I've seen sites with good hoe ops and the site stays clean and the scatter is kept to a minimum whereas I've seen sites with dirt hoe ops doing demo turn out looking like a bomb went off. So my opinion is the best machine is a good set of hands in the hoe seat that knows how to munch up the material into smaller sizes. Of course a hydraulic thumb really seems to help out too but not ways necessary. Skidsteer with a grapple is a tremendous help too but I know guys who do a lot of demo with nothing but track hoes. Clintm said it best. If there are basements at all use them as stockpile area for crushing the bulky demo into smaller sizes.
Would be curious to hear if anything has changed on this over the past 8 years for folks
Thumb bucket on the hoe.
A landscape rake on a tractor could clean up small debris pretty good. They make them for skid steers too.