hi folks here is the deal, a frind of my ask me to give him a price for a dozer operation at his dirt dump he got a 800 000 sf lot that he need to be filled ruffly 12 feet but no building allowed so i don t have worry with compaction just fill it, he plan about 40 to 80 truck a day i have room to dump all 80 a day without pushing anything for few day now the question is how mutch of a dozer i need for this job i figure a d6 size wil be good a d8/d9 wil be moore then wath i need but can a d3 do the job ? it might sound crazy but a d3 i can use it on other smaller job so more work and cut down the cost of a bigger machine or maby a tracked loader ? thanks for your reply
For jobs like ive gotten away with a 450 case albiet i wish i had a bigger dozer at my disposal but because i would have the truck dump the loads close to each other i would skim the tops of the loads and fill in the lows and never really have to push a great deal of material
How much time do you have to dedicate to this job? No doubt the 3 could probably do the job, but you're probably going to be ready for bed long before you're done though.
If you are only getting 80 loads per day, a D-3 is plenty. I have kept up with 200+ per day with a D-5M with no trouble. On the other hand, a bigger machine will let you do other things, then only spend a little bit catching up. It also depends on what you have available to use. I find what works the best for me is the one I own and have nothing else constructive to use it for.
Am I reading this correctly.... 800,000 x 12' of fill? ~350,000³ yards? I personally would choose something bigger than a D3 if your buying a machine based on this job even tho it should be able to keep up with 80 loads a day. Every time I've used a dozer that small I have wished I had something a little bigger.
A D3 maybe if you have really decent fill material. But if it rains or the material gets less than ideal a lot of time will be spent fixing tire ruts. That is a big area to dry up after a rain storm. I would want a D5 or better yet a D6 size dozer.
Thanks for all the reply Lt-x7 your math are pretty close to mine its gonna be a long job Tinkerer you hit a good point with the dryness of the materiel Anyone had experiance like that on a track loader like a 953c or bigger and how good it push compare to a dozer. With a track loader i can sort materiel better and sreen the good stuff and re use it as Top soil in other project
953C will push similar to a 5M. Running a track loader is a different animal compared to a dozer , which I'm sure you knew anyway. It would take more time to keep your work area level, but you would gain more compaction to support trucks backing in. My opinion , a track loader is a good general purpose machine capable of doing what you are talking about.
What do you plan on doing next after this job is over? I would try and get something that would be usable for the next job down the road. Is this going to be a every day thing? You show up in the morning and push off each truck as it comes in or are you doing something else and show up after 80-100 loads have been dumped and push them off all at once?
If i were you and i bid this job since compaction(as far as for building something on it) is not a problem i would do it in stages i would let every truck dump as close and tightly together as possible on the whole site then come in with the dozer skim over the tops of the loads then do it all over again one more time that will give you your bulk height then set the grade sticks to the desired hieght and dump loads only were you need to get your finished height
I was on a dump site that we dumped quite few semiloads fairly close together with the intention of knocking them down all at once. Before I got them leveled and sloped to drain over 5 inches of rain came made a horrible mess that took a loooong time to fix so that I could resume dumping.
What kind of material was it. Down south were im @ 99% of fill is lime rock based mixed with small amounts of soil even if it pouring rain we can keep working and not worry about and when it does dry it will feel like we hit it with a roller every 6" on the way up.
It was silty clay with some topsoil dumped in with it. Only about 3 feet in the core of each load was not soaked. It was a mess. I was on many dump sites through the years and that situation was not unusual. Some of those sites could only be knocked down with a wide track D6. Even then I had to be careful to avoid getting the 6 stuck.
I agree with tinker. if you get rain those pile will turn to mush and it could get so bad that the dozer wont even run on
i forget some times how different condition are outside of where im at, its raining for the past two days and we worked today all day non stop back filling for a home
Ok, there's a lot of variables here that need to be discussed and most have been mentioned. I think the biggest variables are the type of material and the time you have to devote to the project. Two saturdays ago I pushed off one of the dumps we use. We hauled in about 60 loads of topsoil and muck, nasty stuff. The site also takes inert material from a roll-off company - brick, blocks and concrete. There were probably 15 loads of inert material. Took a 953 to push it off as I planned on using the blocks and bricks to bridge the muck we had dumped and it's so much easier push off a mixed load dump with a track loader instead of a dozer. It took about 4 hours of time to push it off and clean it up. Also had a tandem that hauled in 4 loads of muck that day. It's very important to keep your dump organized in order to keep unnecessary work at a minimum. If your material is good sandy/rocky material I would do as others have said and stack the loads across the lift very tightly and knock the tops off, much less work. At this dump there is an upper face (the one I cleaned up) and a lower area to dump in front of the fill lift for the larger concrete loads. There were several loads of muck that were dumped in the lower section that just had the tops of the load knocked off and they created very soft spots for the tandem I had hauling that day. I used the tandem to test the stability of the lift. Luckily I was able to bridge it with some of the blocks and bricks in the soft spots. The size project you are planning can get out of hand very quickly without proper management, regardless of the machine you use. The time you put into managing and staging the fill areas will be time well spent.
thanks for all the input right now here its winter with about 4 feet of snow so the project is not for now the materiel wil come from diffrent loaction and may include sand clay top soil crush stone they want it to be done by layer of 2 feet at the time for some reason they say quality control of the material but my guest is they want some compaction but don t want to pay for it for now the machine of my choice will by a good size track loader not too expensive and can be use for mutilple task on site and for future land clearing job that usely easy to find here, the only down side for me is that it wit probaly be too hevy for a tag trailer so it wil be a lowbed call each time i have to move it , that was the main reason of asking if can it be done with a d3 i wil park the machine there and it wil be a on call push for the begining because its a new dump in the area so by the time the word get out they have a dump that close to downtown in a growing area but i gust they will get more load relly fast , ther is a 3 huge devlopement near by of moore then 15 000 house total with full service so lot of dirt wil need a new home ;-)
thanks for your help cm1995 we are pretty close on our number, to be on the safe side a calculate 12 to 15 load per hours it all depend of the materiel type and placement unfortunatly i am just hire by the dump onwer to push so not mutch i can do for manegement but wil try to talk with them
Glad to be of help. The management of the dump will reflect in the cost of maintaing it and the total cost of the project. How will you be compensated for the work, hourly or some sort of flat rate? Either way it would be in the owners best interest to let you manage the sequence of dumping.
If it is wet or gets wet, keep in mind a track loader will get stuck 10 times easier than a dozer and filling the ruts will take a lot longer. If you're doing it in lifts, it has to compact enough for the trucks to drive on it without getting stuck. I think if you were spreading 3 loads or so as the trucks brought it in a D3 would be OK but if want to level 80 loads at a time, you need at least a D5. 350,000 yds. is a lot of dirt. I've never done anything that big but I'd work in sections and let trucks dump in one section while I leveled another one.
I disagree. Yes a loader is heavier than a dozer and can get stuck easier but it's all about how you tackle it. Since this will be a mixed load dump a track loader is more useful in separating the good material from the bad and using the good material to bridge soft spots. You may have to carry the better material across the site to fill in softs spots and ruts or dig the soft spot out and dump a load of good material to bridge. If the trucks are rutting up, you need to try and bridge the area with better material, not just fill the ruts in with the same material, as that's a never ending process. It gets back to how the dump is managed.
Any machine might get stuck At some point. Because this wil be a one machine operation i beleve the track loader have More chanse of. Getting itself out. Using the roling bucket trick. When a dozer with a straight blade get stuck not mutch it can do. But that all in my head i have limited experiance. With bolth machine so any advice is more then welcom. As the bid they ask for flat price base on regular tandem load. Semi load. Wil be count as 2 tandem load. And for the plan ther is a looging road across the lot so we wil work from ther. We have a local demolition compangy near byy i wil ask them if they can. Dump us few load of brick. That wil be the bridging materiel for the rest god knows. Wath i am gonna get
One other thing that concerns me in the management area: If you don't have somebody out there, you WILL get truck drivers who'll dump the wettest, goopiest muck right in the road, or wherever's easiest.
We recently were filling a dumpsite. We had a 655 C loader,a 650 H Dozer, and a compactor. About the most we could handle was 250 loads a day. That was 3 of us working non stop with very little time for lunch or bathroom breaks. The loader could knock down more dirt faster than the Dozer. Part of the problem was the dirt had a lot of basketball and bigger sized rock in there that slowed the dozer down. At that same site we had 100 or so loads dumped and not spread and then they got rained on. The 650 Dozer could not deal with it. They ended up bringing in a D8 which had no problems. In my opinion a 650 sized dozer is not an optimal machine for bulk dirt pushing. I maybe off base here but is a D3's footprint about the same as a 650's? If they are about the same footprint I would atleast get a 650 or D5 instead of a D3. They want be that much more difficult to haul and they will be more versitile.
If your hart is set on a track loader and depending on your budget I would either look at a 955L or K. If you have a little more money to spend a 963 or 973. With a 955 you can get good compaction and they can be picked up for a descent price. You just have to be careful, the bottom can fall out from underneath you real fast with one of those. Now a 963 or 973 in a lgp setup will let you rock and roll through a lot of dirt and tend to be more forgiving in the soft stuff. Just remember what a lot of these guys are saying, water control is key. Nothing will ruin your day faster then having to fight soft spots and puddles.
Very good advice my friend that I am sure is earned through experience. Along that note, you will want to get some sort of "traffic control" for the dump to corral the trucks to where you want to dump. Cones, orange barrels, hunks of concrete - whatever you have available. A driver is not thinking about how far you will have to push the load if dumped way away from the face as they have to deal with all the idiots in cars out there on the roads from the loading site to the dumping site. If your dump fills up quickly without a push off, it will make your work much harder and you will see your per load revenue decline dramatically if you have to push loads a distance to get them to the face.
Not sure what your ground is like up there but any amount of moisture will have you trucks dragging mud down the road. Followed by a local cop and code enforcement officer showing up and shutting you down till you clean the road and putting in a proper temp. road. We prefer R-4s and a ride on sweeper. Even then it still isn't enough sometimes and you find your self out on the road scraping Volkswagen size clumps of mud off the road with a flat shovel.
He's in Canada. Don't think roads are going to be an issue. Not for sure where he's from, but over here in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, some big clumps of mud on the road might be an improvement. Anyone that had driven #5, 34, or 47 highways will understand me completely.
right on, road here once they buil it they let go for 60+ year so its pretty mutch falling apart but the truck wil have to drive 3 miles on a private road made of drainage rock so that should clean them off, if any problem with mud on public road i have a backhoe that i can use at extra charge for the dump onwer
thats the job of the dump onwer they wil put a dump supervizer on site since they are charging for truck to dump there they want to know who dump ther and how meny load then i wil work with them like muddy stuff go on the left side near the ditch to drain dry stuff on right and concrate and brick go middle right and middle left but 2 time more on left side so i can have it near by when i need it i gonna built fodable plywood sing and put it on ech side of the dump section so driver wil see it, if they gonna have a big day like they have 60 load confirmed i wil be on site + its a small detour from my way home evene if they don t have a lot of load push i wil pass by and have a look i preffer pushing more often and its better for my wallet
thanks and yes a lgp setup wil be the best do you know if i can put lgp track on a standar track machine ?? might buy one with worn off track and put brand new lgp on it but not sure if that wil work ??
I'm pretty sure the track frame on a lgp dozer is different then a standered machine. I've seen guys put standered pads on a lgp machine before but I have never seen a guy put lgp's on a standered machine.
LGP machines have a wider gauge to allow for the wider width of pads and are usually longer having more bottom rollers and more links in the chain. Blade trunions are also spaced out to allow the side push arms to clear the track pads.
In a previous life I pushed a lot of dump sites. The mob I worked for had mainly track loaders. In clay a Case 450 would do it and a 941 wasn't to bad either. To get the job done quick a 1150 Case had plenty of power and was quick on it feet.
thanks a lot for all the great info i can't wait to summer see if i can get that contract
If you do we expect some pictures. Good luck!
Thinking about the track loader in lgp , I know the dozers have a wider gauge but I wonder if the track loaders that are lgp have a wider gauge or not. I know some dozers even have an extra roller on the roller frame. Question being is a track loader that is lgp have a wider gauge , extra roller or just wider pads? This may need to be continued in the track loader section.