i have a mound over a pipeline that i leveled this week with a dozer. it left big frost chunks behind. any ideas on how to break these frost chunks up?
spring thaw how big of chunks... I'm guessing they were tougher than the dozer tracks... breaker on a backhoe
we have a JD850 dozer and it hasn't done the job. spring is my first option but the engineer feels otherwise. chunks up to two feet in diameter.
i can't figure out how to post a picture. see the trench at this link http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/yQucCs-D7aDQ--CcaxRXZsEL4ZKdMajdPMTILvsvVXE?feat=directlink
Sprinkle them with a lot of calcium? besides backblading a few times and waiting for the sun to warm them up, I can't think of any practical fix esp if its a long trench, cover with black plastic? flaming tires?
its 25 miles of trench!
All I see is guns... It's an idea, but ammo is expensive.. another option is to haul them off wow 25 miles... that's a lot of chunks
more pictures http://picasaweb.google.com/neiliversen/BDWFrozenChunks?feat=directlink
haha.
That's a lot of trench...
You could rent a Bomag grinder upper thingy
Sheepsfoot roller?
how big of a sheeps foot?
landfill compactor with chopper wheels? Big rome clearing disk, the ones with 3' blades? Or try telling Mr. engineer that if the snow mixes in, when it thaws it will settle and it will look like crap. Better to wait for it to thaw and to grade it once rather than twice.
these seem to be legitimate ideas that i could pull of and only have to travel 250 miles one way for rental equipment: cat 815f compactor wishek y200 disk pulled by ?? scraper to scrap off the chunks and stockpile or haul off dump/articulated truck and loader/excavator to haul off
oh i forgot the option beat on them with the excavator.
That makes me wince, so there's no chance of a quick backblade in the spring? that way things will be settled down nice and smooth.
Call in the Air Force and have a few F14's drop napalm to warm things up a bit. then you could rake them out by hand. or ask the engeneer he is the smart one that wants it done now. also ask him how much money they want to spend to get it done NOW. keep it in his ball park. or is he paying you to figure this out?
this time of year you get one chance at it, otherwise it's tiger teeth and breaker. i don't suppose a groundthawer would do it eh??lol. it is a tough time of year. work it once, leave it low if needed and add later. anything that has to be cut or that has been walked on or driven on is is a real p.i.a. good luck
Use one of those ripper shanks that mount on an excavator. We use them when we have to dig basements in the winter.
Looks acceptable to me for this time of year. Your engineer is unrealistic to expect much better than that at those temperatures. In the spring most of the frozen chunks will melt and collapse by themselves and it will look much better. Is he holding back your final payment until it is graded to his satisfaction? I would say you have reached substantial completion of the work.
He is holding back $400k. We r going to try a wishek y2000 disk and a cat challenger pulling it.
I was going to ask what he holding... $400,000.00 is quite a chunk of change for chunks.. The bomag we have had to use to bust clods that were to big in a fill... the reasoning was compaction.. because the sheeps foot was just pushing them into the ground The disc is pretty heavy so it should do the job...
I am ot sure where I would find a bomag grinder upper thingy. I haven't seen any around. We can't use the compactor. We have an jd850 lgp on site ane even with the frost there are place that it almost breaks through the muck and sinks. The compactor would dissapear.
frost it hasnt been too bad up here latley but when we did have chuncks we either stock piled it till spring or did our finish grade once it melted. did you back fill with any frost? ussually once it melts it will need to re graded in spring anyway.a few years back a large company up here did a long trench in winter. they saw cut both sides of the excavation then left the frost in piles. when they backfilled they sent the chuncks through a crusher so they could rough grade with it. burying the stuff is no good as it makes one muddy hole when spring hits. id leave it till spring then dress it up . if you remove it now i think your going to need more fill to dress it up again later. allthough i wonder if a reclaimer would take care of it???
Now before I even start, let me say that I am totally out of my depth here, with the temperature hovering around 100F today, frost really isn't a big issue and never has been. Looking at photos I was wondering if an FAE type rock crusher would do the trick. It is mounted to the three point linkage on a tractor, so any reasonable size fwa farm tractor should be suitable and would work better in the boggy areas. The machines are designed to crush rock, so frost lumps should not be a problem. Just a thought. http://www.faeusa.com/content.asp?L=3&IdMen=372 RnR.
That is a real harda$$ engineer. I can only imagine how much $$ he has cost you, because if he is that way about those chunks in the frozen ground, I bet he busted your chops in other ways too. Good luck with the disc.
I can't understand why it couldn't be put off till spring, when tillage and grading implements actually function. I say try a heavy disk and be prepared for 2-3 passes. If that doesn't get your money look for a guy with a power tiller or a FAE tiller or crusher. Power tillers are popular with vegetable growers, so that would be the place to look. Man running a disk for 25 miles in a straight line.:Banghead Let alone a power tiller or FAE. ointhead This engineer would be on my **** list forevAARR!:ban
As unpopular a solution as this will be..... break em up with a hoe. No its not nice to do to your machine, but find a nice narrow bucket, put some tiger teeth on it and be as gentle as possible. I spent a nice chunk of this week busting up frost slabs with our 270. Give em a nice little pole down to 8" or less and the dozer will bust em up no prob.
Meri crusher
The thing with the tractor powered crushers is that they require high hp, are relatively narrow, and you must go super slow. I wanna say you need 250hp, they are 36" wide, and you have to keep them in creeper gear.
Im not going into why you have waited until frost has set in to do your final clean ups. What I will get into is your contract. Unless your restoration is valued at 400K, there is no need to withhold that from payment. You should have a value set for restoration in the bid that the engineer accepted. At this point in the construction season, restoration is unreasonable. You will be spreading grass seed that will go to feeding the birds. Simple answer is request payment, minus the value of restoration, plus a portion of your performance bond. After spring thaw, go back, complete project, get final payment.
If all is complete all you should have with held is your hold back the percetege you signed in your contract that is with held until they are satisfied with the work that has been done usualy about 10% or more We use a Iron wolf usualy to get the frost out of the way. Expencive but works excelent!
i am in the road ditch and highway right of way. the engineer is concerned that these clumps are a safety hazard for motorist who go off the road. the work site is saturated with ground water. our trench was up to 25 feet wide and the backfill was jello. with the frost we can just barely get our lgp dozer on it without falling through and getting stuck. that looks like a pretty cool machine although i doubt anything like that is within 1000 miles of where we are.
we finally got the cat challenger 75c started after new batteries and a new starter. we delivered it to the site and hooked it up to our disk which we traveled 300 miles one way to get. here are some before and after pictures. the is one of the better areas. i haven't hear back in a few hours to know any more info. the operators says he thinks it is working good if only the tractor can keep floating on the jello trench. btw the engineer is kadrmas lee and jackson (KLJ) of Bismarck. i post pictures like this on other forums and they show up find, i don't understand why they don't work here.
From what I can see from your pictures it looks a lot better to me, this should satisfy your engineers concerns. I never thought a tractor pulling a disk would break up frozen muck that well.
track type rock crusher
Looks to be working good. Better than i thought it would really. Maybe wait til it snows again to have them look at it.
Run a roller over it and pave it. makes a great bike path.
your pics
the pipeline cleaned up pretty good. we spent about seven days on it. we used the wished y2000. we didn't break anything on the disk although we did adjust it a couple of times. we did shake the muffle apart on the cat 75c challenger we were using as well as had a frost chunk jump up and break a filter housing. i am please with the way it turned out. with the way that this ground was saturated and boggy the cat dropped through a couple of times and we had to have a helper dozer with it to pull it out. i don't think we would have gotten this accomplished even in the hottest part of the summer because i don't think that this ground is ever going to dry out or get solid.