I'm curious about other people's opinion on different digging styles right now I'm running a cat 303 with a 2' bucket ground is hard I have pointed teeth I haven't felt the need to switch to tiger teeth. But my question is I dig in layers bring the trench down evenly so I'm not chasing dirt down my ditch when I hit the hard spots I switch gears and rip the ground from closet to me all the way to where I started digging so in a sense I look at it as slot dozing in a way then I have enough dirt fluffed to bail it out really fast. I'm trying to be efficient and not make any wasted moves so to speak
Hi Jakebreak My machine is smaller than yours and i run tiger teeth on all buckets. I know they are not as strong as normal teeth but they cut through the hard stuff so much easier so in my case there is less load on the machine. In your case if tigers allow you to dig the hard without the need to rip you have saved a lot of time. Even if you are forced to rip running a 600mm bucket in hard ground with your weight machine is hard on the machine, I would put tigers on. I found in my local area i have a bolt on wing at the back edge of the ripper which allows it to rake a bit more material with the ripper. You can rip deeper each pass because the wing pulls a bit of the material away. If your trenching it also rakes the sides a little better because when you go back to bucket unless you have side cutters on your bucket the shale can give the sides of your bucket what for. cheers
I don't have any wings on my bucket the soil we're in is like a clay with a little bit of sand is what it looks like to me I was curious about people's opinion on ripping when it's hard by starting closet to you and working away from you taking 4"-6" each fine thanks for the advice 007
Hi Jakebreak I must admit i have never ripped forward but it makes sense doing that way if you are trenching. I personally rip way deeper than you unless you are close to grade. Probably trying to minimize the bucket changes. If you are doing a wider area and ripping forward you would be running your tracks up over the bulked out material which is undesirable on a rubber tracked machine. Cheers
Yeah when I get close to grade I shallow up how deep I rip the ground so I don't undercut the grade to bad it depends how hard the ground is if the machine is struggling when I take a full bite I will shallow it up a bit thanks for the advice