I have a bid going on a 1 acre pond to be cut in virgin flat ground with clay/loam soils going down to mostly clay, no rock. I am trying to run calculations between the excavator and dozer. Because of the size of cut, I need to get a little closer on my numbers. The D7 has an SU blade that is 5ft high, and 11ft wide. With a very rough calc, I am coming up with about a 10yd push. I realize there are a lot of variables. Decision on depth has not been made, but likely in the 10ft range. I typically do smaller ponds in which the excavator is the more practical method. I am not yet sure how the material will push up and out. I am trying not to handle material twice by excavating, then pushing spoil away.
I'd be surprised if that 7 could average 5-6 yds per push in a slot. A one acre pond 10' deep with 4:1 sides should be somewhere around 10k yards. I would think 800-1000 yards per day with the 7 might be feasible. I don't remember what size hoe you run, but it might be more productive to bail it out as far as you can reach with the hoe and use the dozer to push it out the rest of the way. Either way, around "here", a 1 acre pond would cost at least $15k, more if it's wet.
I run a 322 and can do a pretty confident 2.2y/bucket and on something like this, I could be close to 6 yd/min for a 180* swing.
The Cat performance HandBook shows the capacity of a D7R with an SU blade is 8.98 yards. Being able to load the blade to that capacity is the experience part.
LOL, somewhere I have a CAT handbook, but in the above case, there is zero way my old 7 could move 10yds. But there was a calculation online that I did not agree with that put the capacity less than 2yd. I do math for a living but dozing is sort of complicated. It is sounding like some are in the camp of digging with the hoe, and move the spoil with the dozer?
The big advantage of doing it that way is if the ground is wet at all, you can lift the soil up to where the running is more dry for the dozer, we've all been in that place where we're trying to shove up out of a boggy hole. It goes from no fun to being no production pretty quickly. The final product looks a lot nicer too if you're in semi-soft stuff, you can cut a nice bottom and slopes with the excavator and just back away from it.
If I was doing it that way I would set up so I could reach the slope and cut that and the catch at the bottom and leave the hard ground to one side or the other alone for the dozer to run on. Cut that stripe go back to the other end and repeat. Except for the very last pass all the running is going to be in the pond area itself.