Im having a large loader dropped off on Wed, I have alot of material to move. After thats done I'll need to do my best to get rid of the whoopdeedoos and I'm sure after im done there will be plenty. Any tips or advice would be appreciated.
you can get a large heavy I beam( wider than the loader) and drag behind the loader and it will level out the loose stuff.....if you ever watched ..life below zero..when she flattens out the runway of snow , she drags a large I beam chained to the back of her loader..seems to work well...
Good idea. I have a large drag with 200 pound weights attached to it
and if you have any rocks to get rid of , a york rake on back of a tractor works well....
Obviously filling in the larger ones and back dragging first. I sometimes turn the bucket over to the dump position so that the cutting edge has a slightly backward angle. Put it in float and it will scratch and fill where needed. Don't always go the same way, change up to 90* and 45* degrees from the last round. A box blade on a farm tractor works nice.
When I was renovating my 600' long driveway I had a bunch of the humps to deal with which were very frustrating. I marked the humps with paint and tried to relocate the material which worked okay but not a solution. I had a guy bring a motor grader over and in about 30 minutes it was all smoothed out. I even had a rear blade for my tractor that I angled but still not even close to what a grader can accomplish.
The only way I'd have rocks on my property were if I went to lowes and bought some.
Ill have a better response later. On property now, on a cellphone and internet spotty
Before excavators arrived I had to learn to final trim using a loader, an AC 545 and what a mongrel job I made of it. An old bloke gave me this tip, sit the bucket level on the ground and as you push use the crowd lever to control the cut or fill. After a little practice it works a treat. Old habits die hard, I still do it when operating a skidsteer loader.
From a backhoe loader perspective grading with the loader is not as trivial as it seems. I've found the most success with the floating methods mentioned above, but I hear the I beam works well too. If you are going with just the loader bucket I've found it better to be pretty heavy on the material to fill with and cleaning it up later if need be.
What type of loader is it. does it have teeth or a straight edge on the bucket.Try not to spin your tires when filling the bucket,that makes great potholes and eats rubber. Back blading with the bucket in float works well, lock it in float then roll the bucket forward to cut and back to smooth out. Thats always worked well for me cleaning up providing your ground isnt too mucked up.
Just getting home after 5 days out there, Ill try to make this as short as possible, Ill upload a video when my wife downloads it. I have a few pics but not many. The video will be much better. I learned alot, first and foremost I understand that no one here can understand the size of the job I am working on. Its not a small job such as a 1/4 acre lot. It was completely ludacris to assume that I could have learned what needed to be known in the 40 hrs allotted me with the machine. Maybe there are guys born with this skill but I am not one of them. With that said I learned a TON and I thank God that I was given the chance in my life to have experienced it. I learned wheel rolling ( thats the technique of packing down material with a full bucket ) I learned almost VERY successfully how to move the fluff ( thats the pile of cut dirt that an experienced loader operator has made for you to move ) Its easier to move the fluff cause for the most part its just that, fluffy material thats already been cut. By the end of the day last night Id say Im pretty darn good at moving fluff. I learned to go into the material with just a little momentum, dont ease into it too slowly, once into it dont curl the bucket immediately but instead lift the bucket a little at level and then gently ease into a curl, doing it like this makes less trips cause more material in the bucket. I learned to cut it and make the pile nearby, dont cut and drive 400 feet with a half bucket, make the fluff and then move it, it will save literally hours and hours of work never mind the fuel savings. One VERY important thing I learned was when cutting the hard stuff absolutely keep the ground smooth beneath you by back dragging with just a little downward angle on the bucket, you might think that machine has enormous ground clearance...... it does not! If you get bogged down in your old tracks your belly will drag and you are just spinning digging yourself into a hole. I learned DO NOT let the wheels spin, once the wheels are spinning your done, lift up what you have, dump it on top of the pile, lower the bucket into the top of the pile and pull some material backward. Back up, clean up your mess and start over. I learned how to be a pretty good transit operator, so simple and foolproof. What a great tool to have I learned how pretty it is to backdrag a 200 foot swipe, that material looks so good, smooth as glass. I learned articulating loader is the way to go, Ive driven a few conventional steering loaders, articulating is sorta like a zero turn mower. I learned that a front end loader like I had really isnt a multi purpose tool, for moving material in great amounts like Ive done its the machine to have, grading a large area...not so much, I have a bulldozer being dropped of on Thurs supposedly to do the final grading. I found a guy that has many years of experience in heavy equipment operation. I paid him 2 hundred dollar a day and I couldnt be any more pleased with the work he did, he and I completely changed the landscape of my property, it is unrecognizable at this point to what it was. We took a blah, so so piece of property and transformed it into something fairly unique and usable. I also learned that a wheel loader this size running 13 hrs a day ( he worked 7 and I worked the 6 ) consumes hundreds of dollars in diesel especially when its being used as a bulldozer in which there were some instances. I prob learned alot more but these are the highlights. Enjoy the pictures and dont let anyone tell you cant do something, with enough seat time Id be an expert but for me it would be more than 40hrs. Attached Thumbnails
Great report, neat pictures, and a pretty good fire, 1930! It's amazing how quickly you can become functional with these machines. I won't say good, but you can get some work done and learn the intricacies of the machine pretty quickly. Thanks for sharing!
! thing I should have mentioned earlier was that articulated loader have a built in tilt so you can dig with the corner of the bucket. By going to where you start the cut at an angle then turning with the bucket on the ground the out side will all ways dig just a little deeper.=tilt You done a good job for a newbie.
Good job doing that with a loader, 40 hours isn't much time to get proficient. I had about 50 hours of seat time in my D39P-1 dozer (now sold) and I couldn't finish grade to save my life.
If I could dig sand I'd feel like I died & went to Heaven. You got the easiest site on the planet. Try holding a grade with stones 2'! Or, dig a 24" deep ditch with 4' diameter boulders in it. Your whole project could be done with the loader forward to move volume, then backdrag with bucket floor level to smooth.