I haven't posted much on here for the last while. I've been operating heavy equipment for about 20 years now and bounced around Western Canada a bit in my earlier years. And in recent years had a stint in Southern Alberta which didn't work out well sadly. I'm working for a bit of a friend of mine for the past while I started working for him in 2014 when he was going through a pit of an expansion period. He started with one Hitachi ZX160LC modded to run a Promac 36" disc style brush cutter/mulcher so he could go after mulching jobs on pipeline and powerline right of ways as well drainage ditches and private work. He started to expand by buying a 2013 Kobelco SK210LC Mark 9 one of the first machines with DEF which is a nice machine to operate with a spacious cab unlike the Hitachi but the DEF was a headache until the warranty was off. And then he also leased a similar Kobelco but it had the Hino engine with a DPF/EGR system and was much more reliable. We were quite busy that summer working for a larger earthmoving contractor who had a number of jobs in our corner of Manitoba, as well some Conservation District related work, and pipeline related work. However by the time October rolled around and the weather started to cool down the jobs finished up and one particular job has been held up by a bunch of idiots in Ontario and Quebec (Energy East Pipeline) indefinitely. In 2015 I had moved my family to Southern Alberta as any work for me in Manitoba seemed to fade away and my friend had a hard enough time paying all his bills. He did manage to get some mulching work and even bought a Promac 52" flail mulcher for the 'good' Kobelco to run but the damage had been done he was forced to return the second Kobelco and had to reorganize his company. I was having my own difficulty finding any decent work in Southern Alberta and even worked on a couple ****** oil sands jobs. Late in the summer he called me up and said a whole bunch of work came in and he needed a guy to keep up I ran the sad, slow little Hitachi digging trenches for a utility installation crew. And he worked for the municipality on a ditching and culvert installation project. Eventually I finished with the trenching work and then started on cleaning 3 miles of ditches for the Conservation District in two different locations as it had turned out to be quite a wet summer and some farmers fields were literally under water. Expecting colder weather we cleaned up the machines (mostly the tracks) which was quite the job as we had been called for a large powerline mulching job in some rough country.
The trenching work isn't complicated but does require some degree of finesse as the gas line has to be a minimum of 1 foot or 30cm away from the primary and secondary power lines and with the curved roads and cul de sacs I tend to widen the trench as the radius doesn't favour a long straight boom and stick. lol The trenches are only about 4 feet deep and usually the same width. The larger excavations are for pad mount transformers and pedestals for telephone/internet and fiberoptics depending on what's specced for the subdivision. The services are usually a much smaller squareish hole where the 1/4" gas line is rolled up into an open bottom wooden box with a tracer wire and locator beacon. The power cable for the building is also rolled up in a same kind of box along with a telephone or t.v. cable that are patched in to after the building is constructed.
That Kobelco looks like a 210-9, those are nice machines
Our brush mulching job entailed about 19km of power line mulching through a Provincial Park and some very rocky terrain in some spots and swampy ground or muskeg in the lower parts. I jokingly called it swamp logging. We were hoping that the ground would freeze so we wouldn't have to worry too much about walking out in to the swampy area's but it didn't so I would go with the disc style brush cutter and zip off the trees at the bottom and lay them out so we could advance. And the utility company we were working for understanding of the need to 'float'. I spent a few days with the flail mulcher which we kept running close to the road as it wouldn't throw the shrapnel in all directions like the brushcutter and it worked better in the smaller diameter wood. The brushcutter however you can almost run like a hotsaw on a feller-buncher and drop trees too green or too large to be mulched. Both machines have detachable polycarbonate windshields as with traditional screens you can still get a high velocity stick between the bars! This I have seen myself.
Where we started the job the bush was quite dense with quite a bit of dead fall as we worked our way down the hill we were able to mulch a little more in to the ground as there were fewer rocks and where there were rocks we were forced to 'hover mulch' which is never fun and your forced to maneuver around the boulders. The brush cutter is a neat tool it has bullet shaped carbide tipped teeth that can rotate in their holders, it has hardened steel side cutters which I use more than anything and smaller carbide tipped teeth on the top that can work like a wood chipper sucking in stick and wood and spitting out chips. The flails on the flail mulcher have carbide material on the inside part of the hammers and have a little more give if you touch a rock as they tend to swing away but it doesn't mulch the larger trees like the brush cutter.
Working in to the boggy area's you have to keep your wits about you as don't have a bucket on so you can pull yourself out and if a soft area doesn't have trees stay out it's floating muskeg. Some of the softer area's I could lay down a mat of willows and poplar trees for some extra support but once I got in to the open swamp we would have to crawl out on to the road and walk the machines down to an area of good ground and start all over again.
I spent most of the following winter ill with a stubborn respiratory infection and about midway through the summer my wife pulled rank and said we were moving back as nothing much was working in my favour, she had good employment but due to low oil prices it was difficult to find anything decent for me plus we were renting a house and getting screwed around by an over zealous Realtor. But my friend had work quite a bit actually and lots of it private meaning the company name and reputation had gotten around I guess and we had more utility work and municipal drainage and ditching work as well. I did manage to do some mulching with the flail for a local guy having drainage issues in a big clump of willows where it worked really well. We ditched this piece a couple months later.
I had a job stripping topsoil for a granular fertilizer storage building it really could of been done with a dozer but they insisted on having us do it so I bailed and double bailed it all to one side. And also helped them get the coarse gravel base set up. They were going to use pit run to begin with as it was something like a 2 foot lift but I recommended geotextile with 6" minus crushed limestone rock as it compacts better and if it rains its less likely to turn to mush as this type of rock likes moisture and did require adding lots of water while compacting it. They eventually had a D5 come in to spread the crushed rock which was a lot faster than using an excavator to pad it in. lol
The fertilizer company wanted to keep costs down so they rented the D5 and I trained their very busy maintenance man how to run it and after the crushed rock was placed a contractor came in and took over and did the rest of the prep work for the concrete.
Last batch of photos for the night the D5 with my apprentice padding in crushed limestone and you can see the ad hoc water tanker it was equipped with a 3" 5h.p. pump and a length of hose. The dump trailer was also rented from a local gravel supplier and the limestone quarry was only a few miles away. To save some money all the building footprint go the limestone gravel the rest was done with pitrun and eventually 3/4" minus limestone.
I had a small burial job for a local farmer one of his buildings had burnt down so he wanted the rubble buried as deep as possible to prevent the frost from heaving up the concrete foundation that was left behind. I dug three separate holes around 18 feet deep in the gooey Red River Gumbo we have out here it was interesting to see what was used a concrete reinforcement. lol It also didn't take long before my bucket was completely plugged that clay is often the most terrible scheisse to work in but at least I didn't have to do it for days on end like I have in the past. The leftover structure fell a part quite easily and didn't take much of a fight to tear it a part.
It's a nice machine when things are running good, it gave a lot of problems with the DEF system till the warranty period ran out then we got a bypass for that. Last year I had started on a mulching job for a farmer's fence line and the electronic module that runs the auxiliary hydraulics crapped out, it took 3 weeks to get a new one. And recently the main CPU **** itself but only took a week to get a replacement at a cost of about $6,000.
I spent a day and a half digging a basement and clearing some quite large granite rocks. After moving the rocks the digging was quite nice being mostly sand instead of the usual crappy gumbo clay and silt I find myself in. They also had me place most of the drain stone that they will pour their footings on.
A local gravel supplier called us to reclaim a bunch of railroad ballast on a 1/4 mile section of abandoned rail line. All I did was scrape it up in to small piles so he could load it in to gravel trucks with his big Michigan wheel loader. He uses it to make 1" crush of which I hauled a bunch later for a culvert job and because nobody was available to load the tandem I got to run his huge loader, the bucket was wider than the tandem box was long! So the tailgate got a bit sandblasted in the process.
I of course got pictures of that loader, he tried to tell me it was as big as a Cat 992 I said "yeah no, maybe a 988". Either way that made for a fun little job and it was all on the backroads so no worries about the DOT out there. lol
Got some pictures of the skyline dredging machine he uses to bring gravel up from below the water table. Also a view from the operator's seat in that Michigan loader when I was loading the tandem.
Something we don't do all that often unless its for our own jobs, but I spent a day hauling fill in the city for another contractor that was digging a basement addition, sure glad sometimes that this truck has an automatic tranny with all the stop lights between the dump site and the basement. The Case 160 sure was a nice machine and seemed to have a lot more power and speed than the Hitachi I normally run.
We started running out of some steadier work not that we didn't have any so we took on a job with the Highways Department in the rolling and very pretty Western Manitoba near Riding Mountain National Park. We took a couple back roads hoping that it would be a little faster but the one was apparently being rebuilt as you can see in the pictures. It's very seldom we see a dozer in this Province bigger than a D8K so this D10 was a pleasant surprise.
We took the brushcutter, the ditching bucket, and the 42" digging bucket as well the tandem and trailer as I was suppose to do a couple smaller jobs for the Highways Department after finishing the bigger one. The job entailed grubbing large tree stumps and mulched brush as well separating any logs so locals could cut them up for firewood. Originally the stumps and mulched up bits were going to be loaded in to roll off bins and hauled to a landfill for burning as some 'Safety Sally' decided that it wouldn't be safe to do.
As I started the job I found myself digging out large Balsam Poplar tree stumps that sometimes had root balls that would go down 4 feet! The old girl handled them pretty well, but it was still a lot of strain on the 'Hitch' my boss always wants me to run in economy to save fuel but some of these stumps required quit a fight and some good lifting power. So I would pile up the easy stuff pull up the stumps and let them dry in the warm fall sun. There were a few spots where I was able to dig holes on this side of the road and bury some of the junk but I had to watch it as there were phone lines. Some locals said when and if I had some transportation we hauled the junk to a couple slough's or dried up marshes on their land and then covered them up with what bit of dirt that I did have available. Once I filled up the smaller hole using our tandem (hired in trucks hadn't been sorted yet). I started loading and hauling with my tandem to the bigger pond. I of course did have a load or two jam up in the tailgate so I had to track all the way there to sort it out. I found that the bottom of the pond had about two to three feet of really nice black topsoil so I ended up digging it down to clay and turned the thing in to a landfill preserving the topsoil for backfill and providing a nice close place to get rid of stumps and brush and eliminating have to haul stuff any further away. Also saving the Highways Department some money....something they know nothing about. I also had to try and manage some abandoned barbed wire I didn't have bolt cutters but a cordless angle grinder with a cutting wheel worked. I tried to use rocks as rip rap around the culverts
The job dragged on as I was still didn't have any trucks to haul the big stumps. I had told the Highways foreman in charge of the job and that district I either needed a rock truck or ADT or at least a tandem with the tailgate removed. He said they didn't have rock truck on their call out list so he couldn't hire or rent one. But some days he could supply one of his plowtrucks with the tailgate removed and so I was finally able to get rid of the big stumps in to my home made landfill. But this wasn't very often as they were trying to finish up some of their summer season jobs like asphalt patching on the beat up highways. Usually this consists of spraying the potholes and blowouts with some oil and simply smearing perfectly good asphalt over the affected area with a grade and doing a half a$$ed job of packing it so you can be assured it will blowout again in a few months time. So on the days I couldn't haul stumps I put my ditching bucket on and regraded the ditches and hauled some of the dirt for backfill at my dump sites as well loaded out finer brush and even boulders that farmers had over the years dumped in to the ditch.
Good stuff
Few more pictures of the finish work I did. Some parts of this ditch if they weren't full of brush and stumps they were full of rocks and likely from the farmer clearing the land it was ridiculous the amount of rock there was.
Finally it snowed and the Highways Dept. people decide they would finish the job and I was able to load the last of the stumps out. Plus we got a call to work with my favorite utility crew. I didn't even get to finish grading the ditches just pack up and roll out! lol
I forgot to post these pictures from earlier in the Fall we were asked if we could help out a 'pole crew' that was having difficulties keeping their holes open due to running sand in an almost remote and sparsely populated part of the province. The boss had been out there in the spring with these guys and dug in several miles worth of poles. I dug one or two, one was new but a woodpecker drilled a massive hole in it. Some neat machinery that I couldn't resist taking pictures of.
After I got the hole open it was probably around 12-15 feet wide and not quite as deep because these were I think 60 foot poles, the digger trucks would swing the pole in as quickly as possible and the guy in the loader/backhoe dropped a cut off piece of pole in to the hole I guess to help brace it. Few more pictures of the 6x6 Delta Digger which was a really cool machine. And the hollowed out hydro pole.
So anyway back to more trenching and underground utility stuff I dug probably some of the straightest trenches I had dug at that point with my wore out frost teeth, there was actually little to no frost at this point which made the job much easier. Then I had to pull some pipe through a road crossing and some drill holes. After we were done a developer hired us to clear some land for a small residential subdivision he originally wanted us to mulch it but due to the close proximity of people's houses, sheds and the like we cleared it conventionally stacking all the big logs in to two different piles one with balsam poplar and the other with parkland Aspen so people could cut them up for firewood depending on preference. The other brush was piled up to be dealt with later.....I was hoping we could torch it but I think it was hauled away instead.
The Kobelco however suffered an accident during this clearing job and had a tree spear the boom side window so we had to take it to a heated shop to get replaced.
Great thread, enjoying the pictures and stories, cheers. Looks like open country and cold out there, bet your mate was glad to get his window fitted asap!
Thanks! Yeah it wasn't too bad really I ran it for a bit like that and there isn't much wind in the bush like that thankfully and it hadn't gotten really cold yet when we did that job. The real down side other than the broken window was having to move the machine to get fixed and then bringing it back as we had another job down the road about a month a half later.
After Christmas we started on a brush mulching job for the municipality on a ditch that had grown in over the years some places it was quite thick others not so much but the trees were big and we started getting the really cold weather at this point almost -40C which is where its the same as fahrenheit -40F. Normally we would leave the equipment parked when it's this cold as steel can become brittle and hydraulic oil can be quite thick but we had a couple jobs lined up afterwards so it had to get done. Some trees I mulched up were pretty big and kinda dangerous because of their height. So I would take note of any lean to the tree or the branch that I was trying to cut and make a wedge cut in that direction before finally doing a back cut then I could mulch up that piece on the ground. The one good thing about this kind of cold is that trees become quite brittle and they break up far better. Normally willows are a pain in the butt to mulch up being kinda wirey but at this temperature they shredded up pretty good.
I only had one breakdown while on this job one of the auxiliary hoses started leaking at the crimp, but that was due to the stress from the angle it was at. It needed a slight bend to it so I got the boss to get one made up for it. It just required dismantling the brush cutter frame to get at the far end of the hose which was a lot of fun at -36C.
As I got further in to the bush became more dense and the terrain rougher as I crawled over rocks pushed up through the ground by a millennia of frost and dropped off by retreating glaciers. I eventually crossed an old beaver dam and was initially concerned about dropping through ice and in to a mud pie but it had been drained and dried before winter's arrival.
Some video from that job. In the end I did end up mulching about another mile maybe a bit less and I was going to go right up to the road, but some people that own a piece of bushland didn't want a big swath opened up because they had problems with hunters trespassing on their land so the municipality shut down the job about 300 metres before the road. lol I also still haven't gotten any new pins and bushings for the old girl.
We got on to another 4 party job but by January the ground was frozen almost 4 feet deep largely due to the lack of snow so they hired in our Kobelco so it could rip ahead of the Hitachi it didn't really save any time but we didn't have a ripper for the Hitachi (yet) and the Kobelco has much more power and weight and I wish I could use it in the winter more often.....
If I'm tasked with backfilling the trenches I try to find smaller finer material as a first lift on top of the cables and pipe. However that's easier said than done so sometimes what I'll do is shred as much frozen dirt on the surface as possible mixed with snow so I have a soft or cushion layer on top of the pipe and cable. Only problem is that in the spring when this thaws it will settle a lot and will require regrading. But that's what you get when you don't put any sand on top of the product. The 210 also had a weird issue when warming up where the fuel filter would leak tonnes of fuel out of the top of the canister. And the line to the oil filter started leaking engine oil out of the braids which was weird and an oily mess to clean up and replace. The 210 is nice to operate and all but it just doesn't handle Canadian conditions very well......must be that Fiat Iveco engine or as I call it Fix It Again Tony Iveco. lol I think those Hino are a lot better personally.
Some photo's of oily mess in the pump cabinet from the leaking hose and the leaking fuel filter. And some video of the frost ripping with the 210.
After finishing that job we had a 'smaller' job to do that should only take a few days to a week.....Lol Well I started scratching and after more than an hour I hadn't gotten more than a couple machine lengths and not to depth either. The 210 was working at a gravel pit loading granite boulders that were sold to a landscaping supply place and having a battle of its own. So they hired in another guy with a Komatsu PC200 that had just come off a job where it was working at a garbage dump with a Fire Department trying to put out a fire so it was pretty dirty and stinky. But its help was much needed we had to dig down 5 feet because of the pipe that was to be installed for the telephone company. The guys even tried loosening the frost with their digger truck it did an impressive job but it was still a slow process.
How deep is the frost there? Looks like more than a couple feet? I don't envy you guys at all. Winter work sucks. I have a couple more jobs I could do, but haven't decided if I want to deal with the cold and frost, or just say the hell with it until next season. I've had several injector failures on my 210, and not really sure I want to run any No. 1 in it, additive doesn't cut it when temps get down close to 0°F. Nice pics.
I've dug through roads before and have seen it go over 7 feet before. And I have seen it before where there was a snow drift 6 inches or less. It all depends on snow, traffic, and weather. 2013/2014 was the coldest winter I can remember and a lot of people had problems with frozen water lines because they weren't 8 feet or deeper but even if they were and your water wasn't moving for a period of time it could freeze. My parent's place did they were gone for two weeks and for the first time in history their water line where it ran under the street froze somebody told my dad that it had gone as deep as 10 feet! We have had our share of troubles with fuel we only really have two grades of fuel here unless you buy from Shell they have a 'premium' grade apparently. Starting in the fall like end of September beginning of October we put an additive in the fuel to help lubricate the injection system and to take care of any water in the fuel. A few years ago the government here mandated that diesel fuel had to have some amount of biodiesel in it and I guess as the weather gets colder they put less and less but still the fuel doesn't lubricate as it should and always seems to have some crap in it of some kind. We constantly monitor the water separators and fuel filters and from time to time drain any sediment and water out of the fuel tank. A friend of mine gave me a couple links for better water separator/ fuel filtering systems and depending on the budget we may employ them this year at least on the Hitachi as the water separator is a flimsy plasticy thing that leaks. https://class8truckparts.com/fleetg...WkNQ6uittESFjNI81NBVgGxpfL8dTiyGWuBFzlWR8JID0 We don't like working when it gets really cold but sometimes you have to I wish we could get more mulching jobs in the winter, its a lot better than ripping frost that's for sure.
Have you tried opti lube, claimed to be good to -50. Goo injector cleaner too. http://opti-lube.com/diesel-fuel-improver/winter-blend-diesel-fuel-improver.html
The boss had a rough job he had been hired by a gravel outfit to load oversize boulders in to gravel trucks for landscaping purposes but the company that had been subcontracted to crush and screen this pit had quite a bit of sand mixed in making it very difficult to pry them a part. Really he needed a second machine in there with a concrete breaker to chisel them out a little more effectively.......I think I would of gave up he had to get some welded up on the ripper and wore out at least a set of teeth.
Boy I like 115 degrees heat because you dont shovel sun shine In the valley here the ground doesnt freeze period up north in the mountains the frost line is only 18 inches and the ground doesnt freeze that I have seen just the water lines but if they are 2 foot deep no problems
If I could offer a suggestion on your pictures. If you 'shrink/resize' the picture dimensions down to 1/4 the size it would take considerably less time to load, the viewing result would be the same. 16MB pictures are far beyond what PC'S are capable of viewing and they take -forever- to load, even at a 20 MB speed. I took one of you pictures that was 8,458,000 bytes (4608 x 3456) and the 1/4 size (1152 x 864) wound up to be 303,000 bytes or 1/27 the size. (each 'halving' of the size decreases the file size by 1/2 the width and 1/2 the height) In the time it takes to load the one 16MB picture, -27 pictures- could be loaded with the same image quality.
My PC loads them up fine maybe you should get a new computer if your having trouble.
With the arrival of spring we started with more utility work for a while and it had us going from the Interlake and down south near the border. One job I was on the developer wanted me to move his half dead Spruce tree which gave me and the rest of the crew a good chuckle I did my best not to bust it up but its not like a tree spade attachment for the excavator. lol Also got some pictures of a Cat parked nearby.
It was just a suggestion which you can take or not. I merely 'suggested' that if the pictures were cut down to 1/27th the size they will load faster and have no effect on the outcome. FYI- MY computer is a Intel Core-I7 8700 with 16GB memory a Samsung EVO 970 NVMe SSD and a WD Black PCIExpress SSD. Among other things it's connected to a TP-Link ACH-1750 Gigabit Router on a FTTH connection. I have no problem 'loading the pictures' at all but others might.
I'll just add that I am really enjoying this thread but for some reason a lot of the pictures don't come up for me, just a line of text instead. Perhaps CatKC has the reason! (plus my phone is definitely out of date...!) Keep on posting tho, it's great.
4K pics are bit much for those of us not blessed by the fiber gods. At least we don't have a 640x640 limit anymore
Its not a computer issue. Its a internet service issue, where few of us have anything but Hobson's choice. If it wasn't for poor service, we'd have no service at all. I'm glad cold down here doesn't last as long as yours.
I'm glad you guys like the thread I just don't have the time being a father and a husband and this computer needs an upgrade in the near future as well if I leave the photos as thumbnails does that help?
So we moved to another job and it was spring time and getting quite warm and got the boss to buy some new teeth for the machine I originally wanted paddle teeth but he said they were double the price of regular teeth but these teeth have been pretty good in terms of wear and tear as I got in to quite a bit of rock later in the year. The frost teeth I've been using are good in clay and silt but any rock they seem to wear out pretty quickly. So once I've worn out the frost teeth we're going to try a different brand that actually has some warranty. I use the Dewalt impact to change buckets with the wedge coupler it saves a bit of time and makes it a little easier to get the nuts on nice and tight. The trailer also makes for a decent work bench just needs a vise. lol
I don't know what the answer is either. Old forums would limit picture size. This one lets you upload them full size and resizes them on the other person's screen to fit. It is nice if we need to be able to zoom in on some fine detail in an injection pump. We can just about read the numbers off the battery if you zoom in on the blue impact wrench there. But the picture would be just as good if it didn't have that level of detail. I would suggest that the forum software have some way to resize, or not, depending on the uploader's choice. But I do not know if it allows this. I have an easy image resizing program. But it does take some time to fiddle with the computer and make it work. Fortunately for me I have a mediocre internet connection so I can get the huge pictures eventually. But as stated some people where it is too slow, they just see a line of text and the computer gives up before finishing the download, because it just takes too long.
FWIW, I agree on the picture size issue. So as not to derail this thread, I'll start another one with my thoughts over in Forum Support.
Management decided my crew didn't need their traditional digger truck for putting in street lights and instead said use a skid-steer auger and this clamp thing. Well it works alright but it's difficult to rotate the light standard in to its final position. And you can't squeeze too much as it's made out of hollow galvanized steel usually where this clamp is designed to be used with the traditional wooden power pole or we call them here 'hydro poles' since the Province is run off of hydro electricity. At lunch one day we were talking about why management doesn't get an auger power head for the Hiab on their line truck and modify the end of the Hiab so a pole can be pulled tight against it like on the digger truck. At least then they would get their money's worth out of that truck and eliminate dragging all this stuff around.
I did a few smaller private jobs for a while including demolishing this old house basement. Also moved our equipment around and did some land clearing for a developer that needed some drainage corridor's established. We were suppose to start on the ditching for this developer but the approvals and engineering stuff postponed the start so long that the ground is now frozen so we can't do much till the spring. But at least its confirmed work for next year its nice when we can delay jobs this long.
I did some more 'brushing' for the municipality and the Conservation District as well a private customer. The truck box on the tandem was sandblasted and repainted and a lot of repair and maintenance work was done to both the tandem and the trailer. Also made sure to get some photo's of a couple track loaders I always pass by in my travels. I use to run track loaders quite a bit in the past but never ran one with a backhoe on it let alone one with an extendahoe.
At one client's place he had his own track loader that he used regularly around his farm. I brushed a strip for a fence he was going to put up for his cattle a long a swampy silted in ditch. The plan is to clean out the ditch but the other side still has an old barbed wire fence buried in to the bush so we might grub and burn it at some point, and in the spring we'll clean the ditch out. With all the brushing I had to clean out the radiator and while a leaf blower works fairly well I used my home made wildfire rig, then I didn't end up with cattail fluff flying through the air all over the place.
My fire skid consists of a 55 gallon poly barrel that I built a cradle for using scrap 2"X3" 's and 2"X4" 's I cut them with my circular saw by putting it at its farthest angle and it seemed to cradle the barrel fairly well. I put a bulkhead in the far side so I can leave the pump idling and not worry about it getting damaged if I turn off the nozzle and move the vehicle and also for filling. The pump is a 2.5h.p. 1" pump that produces 42 psi. at 41gpm or something around there. I put a gauge on for sh!ts and giggles and I have it configured so I can run 1" or garden hose I have some 3/4" lay flat hose that's 50' long that rolls up nice and compact. I also carry some suction hose so I can refill or even draft from a water source and a number of adapters and nozzles......Everybody thinks I'm nuts but I've been to a few brush and grass fires and with all the glacial till in this area and how dry it's been the least couple years it doesn't take much to accidentally start a fire especially when I'm running the brush mulcher. It's also handy to clean out the radiator. lol
In that last picture I cleaned up through a dry creek, In these area's there use to be a lot of little creeks that ran to the Red River but over the years various Conservation Districts, municipalities, and the Provincial government straightened them, redirected them and turned others in to more of a ditch than an actual water body. Some of it was to alleviate flooding during the spring and heavy rainfalls as this area was a lake after the glaciers receded and is now a natural flood plain. But a lot of this was done to accommodate very intensive farming.
Because this year was so dry the municipality had us brushing and cleaning out ditches that were often very difficult to do a proper clean out. I hope next spring we're working drier ground. lol The flies were unreal.
Gotta love brushing through spruce trees or well any kind of coniferous trees they smell so good. lol
Where is the blade ?
On that D10?
Something I wanted to share as I continue my thread is how we keep the thumb from drifting on the Hitachi and Kobelco using some ready rod, nuts and bolts, and some rebar. Now I'm personally not a big fan of the stick mounted thumb I'd rather have a proper grab preferably a rotating one but that's not always an option for everyone. Currently the hydraulic system on the Hitachi is set up for the brush cutter so I can't use the thumb because the seal on the thumb cylinder will rupture and leak. I also learned how to run an excavator 'old school' so I can do a lot with just a toothed bucket or a cutting edge especially with a tilt ditching bucket. I've been bugging the boss quite a bit just to take it off completely as I haven't used it in a year and since it seems to be such a hastle to reduce the relief valve pressure when I'm not using the brush cutter.
This was a neat little clearing job for a farmer he had bought both pieces of land on either side of this windrow and wanted to join the two and then plow in drain tile right across. Well first thing was to clear the vegetation which looked simple enough at first but ended up being a job that was better suited for piling and burning than trying to mulch it. Much of this bush was some type of berry bush that didn't cut well at all it would often get pulled into the brush cutter and some chunks would get torn off and thrown for a couple hundred feet or it would wrap around and even stall the cutter. So often all I could do is cut it at the base while sweeping it off all the piled up field stone. After switching over to the tooth bucket I started raking the brush off the rock piles with the teeth trying to keep everything separate while wishing I had a skeleton bucket or a brush rake or maybe both. There was a ton of rock all glacial till cleared off over the last 80 or more years by the original settlers in that area some rocks being absolutely massive and one I eventually dug up was nearly as big as the machine and nearly as heavy and kinda cemented in to the hard pan below. I had to dig a ramp just so I could try to pull it out.
Some of the larger rocks that I could manage to pick up I tracked to the edge of the field as it would of been difficult to lift them up high enough to get in to a rock truck (ADT). In the end we didn't do the final cleanup as some gloomy wet weather had moved in and kept us from renting a rock truck and hauling the brush and rocks off the field. And I was transferred to work on a couple big ditching jobs until the end of October beginning of November. The farmer wanted it done a.s.a.p. and hired somebody else to finish the job so he could have the drain tile installed in a more timely manner.
Some pictures of the mammoth boulder I found while cleaning up the last windrow of rocks. The top of it was right at the surface and had to be removed well it took digging around it down to about 4 feet down and a ramp so I could drag it out of its glacial resting place. I was curious as to how they dragged or pushed it off the field or if they hired somebody to drill it and split it.
After that fun little job I got in to ditching and got to spend some time in the Cadillac of the fleet the Kobelco. lol The one thing I love about that machine is the spacious cab compared to these Deere/Hitachi machines and the more ergonomic joysticks. The thumb retainers for the Kobelco fell apart and the boss doesn't want to dismount the stupid thing so we're looking for other ways to hold it back against the stick.
There isn't really anything too exciting about ditching we just had a lot of it this year as it was a municipal election year so they were throwing tonnes of money at ditching this year plus conditions were quite dry for most of it supposedly enabling us to get in to some trouble spots. Sometimes spreading out the muck in farmers fields can take a few months to a year because its so sloppy but this year they had a friend of the company out in force with his International TD-20's pushing and spreading and he'll be hard at it again in the spring. He's got an amazing fleet of International and Cat dozers and scrapers. I'll post some pictures a little later you guys will love it.
On my way home one day on hwy#12 a New Holland tractor towing a couple trailers full of square bales caught fire right at rush hour. The Fire Department worked quickly to get it under control before they lost any bales. I think some had started smoking but were quickly doused!
This ditch was kinda interesting as it had been a problem spot for many years, the family that lived adjacent to it said they had several years where in the spring the municipality had to use large pto powered pumps to move water away from their property so finally this year the Conservation District and the municipality teamed up to clean the ditch along side the road and this one that cut through the bush I had a few quite evident high spots including in this corner so hopefully this helps the people in this area.
After the boss kicked me off the Cadillac and back on to the penalty box (the Hitachi) I started on a new ditching job running parallel with an existing gravel road and running in to a large flood channel. It needed to be ditched largely because a nearby highway was being rebuilt and some nearby farmland on the other side often had standing water on it. Some places I could bail on to adjacent fields but because I was so far down and there was homes along the road I had to bail on to the side of the road so another excavator could rehandle it and load in to a couple tandem axle dump trucks.
Had some terrible weather for October too just a little frustrating. lol
I got to run our rental unit for a day or two a brand new JD180GLC pretty nice machine to run but still not as roomy as the Kobelco, feels more like your wearing the cab on these Deere/Hitachi's. Also terrible fuel economy compared to the Isuzu that should be under that hood. But it was new and everything was nice and tight unlike the penalty box I'm forever stuck on.....
The 180 was an impressive machine it had the undercarriage of a 210, the boom and stick of a 210, but the body and engine of a 160 and a little less weight than a 210 making it a little easier to transport. The fuel system on the 180 is a lot better than our aging 160 with no less than three canister style fuel filters each with a water separator it also had a tier 3 engine so no DPF or DEF b.s. to contend with or to delete. The price tag was ridiculous though at $240,000CAD with the dealer blaming steel tarriff's. Thanks Donald Chump change!
I don't know but I think the farmer would have rather had the bales catch fire than the tractor burn to the ground.
plastic fuel tanks for ya
Nice work.Same type as work as what i do except no brush cutter.
Yes but coming from the standpoint of an experienced Volunteer Firefighter the tractor is easier to extinguish than a whole bunch of bales on the side of a very busy highway. The tractor driver said he had noticed an oil leak maybe from the transmission so that might have been the cause or had something to do with it.
This ditching job was about 3 miles long and drained a very large area of farm land for many miles it had a number of drop structures to prevent erosion consisting of sheet piling and 12"-18" rip rap. It had also been the site of a large substation construction project a little less than 10 years ago where about a million cubic metres of earth was moved to build up a pad for it to be built on. It's immediately adjacent to the Red River Floodway that prevents the Red River from flooding out the City of Winnipeg by diverting water down a huge channel from the south side of Winnipeg to the North Side of the city near the town of Lockport. This ditch drained through a drop structure in to the floodway and during the construction of the substation the earthmoving contractor had to cross this ditch and never did clean up their crossings properly and had also re-graded the ditch far too high leaving a lot of standing water in it.
It was a bit of a **** show as I couldn't see the bottom at all and had to grade by feel but often what I do and the other guys do is check with the laser receiver on your standard rod that you've got everything set up correctly but it was very difficult to get close enough to the bottom without falling in and even when I cut a step in to the back to stand on the clay was so greasy I still had to put the bucket nearby so I could hang on to something. lol For the first while I smeared out the mud along the sides of the ditch but it was slowing down progress quite a bit so I had to bail it up on to the bank as far as I could reach.
That looks like a bunch of cussing I rarely see mud and when I do I hate it i couldn't imagine working mud for a living has to be a pain but you sure make it look good
It's all we have for the most part here crawling out of the ditch was a bit of a f!$%k fest I still can't believe I didn't get stuck on this particular job with all the greasy clay.
Way off topic but those pictures made me wonder how a certain short time poster on this site is doing with the Cat skid-steer he bought that was involved in a fire. Maybe he would be interested in purchasing a "good used tractor"! Just hope the guy driving that tractor got out and is safe and hope he had insurance to cover the loss!
That is a benefit. No getting screwed by an insurance company who want to rebuild it.
got to hand it to you `don`t see any signs of a sunk mach.
Yeah he got out didn't seem like the brightest light bulb in the drawer I had to get him to back the efff up in case a tire blew up or anything else for that matter but he said he lost his phone in the fire.
Yeah the clay bottom was solid just a lot of water and loon $hite on top of it up to the tops of the tracks most of the time. It was a big job to clean the track out after lots of shovelling and even grabbing hand fulls of vegetation.
Cleaning out these little branches from other ditches that join in to this one was fun once I got up to the culvert I had to climb out and finish cleaning out from the side it would of been nice to have a little dozer blade to act as an anchor as I had to sit on the slope and try not to slide back in.
cleaning tracks would have to have been the worst part of the job loons
Yeah I've used pressure washers before and its a slow boat to China, I think a 1" or 1.5" high pressure fire hose around 80-90psi would work better and a guy could stand back a little further and maybe wear less of it. lol These pictures are of the drop structure that dumps water in to the floodway the water has to go over the sheet piling and down the culverts on to a concrete spillway....I wanted to get a torch and cut down the sheet piling a little bit to drain down some of the water. lol
All I have on this is nice work, and how in the **** do you cut the ditch so straight?? I can't trench waterline that straight. Apparently I have much to learn, lol
The province has some laws about driving on the Floodway or something but it didn't stop me. lol And I was in the middle of nowhere so there were no taddle tales around. And not the best pic but you can see one of the large culverts where the water runs down to the bottom of the channel.
Hah if only it was as straight as it seems this one wasn't that bad for keeping straight I just followed the old ditch line and I guess one of my tricks is just pulling the bucket in as centered to my tracks as possible. The work is by the hour so you take your time check and double check especially when it comes to the grade that is the most important. I had a few Muskrats living in there kinda confused by the lack of cattails all of the sudden and there was a River Otter at the beginning that I'm pretty sure flipped me the 'bird'. lol The next problem I had was the weather decided to warm up considerably to the point I was in a t-shirt which also meant that it was crazy windy and all the cattails were 'fluffing' out and my rad was getting plugged. During the summer and the warmer part of the fall I had my home made firefighting skid in the truck with 55 gallons of water on board and a 1" 2.5h.p. pump in the back of my truck behind the slip tank so on a couple of brushing jobs I used it wash out the radiator and that was nice because I wouldn't end up with that fluff flying around in the air. But now because we were starting to get freezing temperatures off and on I had dismounted it and we had also had a fair bit of rain in September and October so I didn't really need it anymore or so I thought. So a call to the boss and he suggested using his leaf blower and it worked alright for the most part at this point the day was done and the wind wasn't dying down so screw it I went home.
Frickin cattails are a PITA. My Case has a window screen in between the charge-air/condenser and the radiator that catches most of it, but I still need to clean it every day.
The towers at the substation give you a bit of an idea on how big that station is, its largely for exporting electricity to the state of Minnesota, kinda high security with out the the guns and that stuff, but they do have camera's and rent-a-cops but they never talked to me the whole time I was working there I didn't even see a security patrol funny enough.
At this point I still had maybe a mile and a half left to go and dug through the biggest dams left behind from the dirt crews building the substation draining a substantial amount of water but still a huge quantity of loon **** that had built up over the years, I would swing around and push down the cattails in to the mud and water trying to keep them from going poof! As well to flatten things out so I can get a better idea of what I'm dredging. Shortly after the boss got a call from the utility company we regularly work for saying they had a month or two of work and maybe more and the rental 180 Deere finished up its project so I was moved out to the utility job and Terry with the 180 finished up cleaning up my slop job.
Yeah and during the growing season they are full of pollen which is terrible for my allergies I personally dislike ditching or at least clean outs like this but what can you do?
I sometimes wondered also about that idiot and how he did on that project.
He did come back on briefly and it looked somewhat finished, but the regular members did not seem too eager to engage him in any more conversation for some reason.
On my way to work one morning I stopped at a nearby truck stop to get a few things for lunch and this guy was transporting this big front shovel bucket to an Oil Sands job in Alberta. So naturally I got a few pictures to share.
So one day after a short day at work I had the opportunity to meet a local legend and check out his fleet of mostly International equipment. Glen who is in his '70's spent many years building municipal roads, lagoons, and drainage projects with his fleet of 'Cat's and Scrapers' he told me one season he built 17 miles of grid roads. He tried his hand at using single engine scrapers but said it was a bit of a flop the soil conditions in these parts are just to challenging for wheeled machines.
There are still a few 'oldtimers' around here that prefer cables over hydraulic conversions on their scrapers and Glen is one of them many guys saying the hydraulics often heat up and slow down too much for them.
It's quite the collection he's got he said at one time he had 30 TD-20's!
I can post more of Glen's collection in the vintage section if anybody is interested I didn't want to get too off topic as I made a couple trips to his place to talk about possibly buying a 1 ton Ford dually with 4x4 and a 7.3L turbo'd engine. Well I went to the town of Steinbach, MB to start on this utility job and it was a bit of a **** show from the start the developer who was also the builder was well in to building houses so we were always over and under the various trades and I had very limited room to pile up any mud or dirt. Every time I have to do a job in Steinbach it seems to get blundered up by the stupidity of that town. Another utility crew working in the area had told us when they came to put in the sewer and water all the houses had already been built and it was a struggle to get anything done. Some houses were pretty much done minus any landscaping or a driveway and the new owners were suppose to take possession while we were there.
While we were there a sewer and water crew was digging a shaft for a sewage lift station they were going down about 30 feet but had to put sand points in to keep the hole dewatered and of course their discharge hose crossed where we were trenching so a little tunnelling had to be done to get under it after putting a couple boards under the hose. They had a neat clamshell attachment on their excavator for digging down to grade. The lift station part that was going in the hole was made out of fiberglass like an underground gas station tank.
You can see in the bottom of the trench I dug in the photos black dirt well some how the developers in these parts get away with not stripping it at all a stark contrast to when I worked in Winnipeg and in Alberta where things like site development and proper soil compaction are taken very seriously.
Again more track shovelling with half rainy and half snowy weather, sure makes you appreciate when its a dry freeze up, also some pretty tight digging and a goofy way to pour a front step.
First time I ever saw a hay bale being used as a void form for a front step to a house. And an interesting home made pile driver for pounding in steel piles normally I see these guys use a hoe pac to vibrate steel pilings in but I guess they needed something better to pound the pilings in the rest of the way.
Well it didn't take long for things to freeze up we went from hovering around the freezing mark to -20C in no time so the boss bought a lightly used frost ripper for the old Hitachi however with the job we started near my place the frost had been packed in to a couple of gravel driveways taking me up to 2 hours to rip about 20 feet by almost 2 feet deep of frozen gravel. My thumb retainers couldn't take the heavy vibration and shock forces and fell a part sadly so now the thumb is clanging away. And I changed the teeth with whatever we had leftover from last winter but it didn't take long to wear them down in the gravel and hard pan.
Those sharp looking corner teeth work really well in straight frozen clay but anything else they wear out quite quickly, however we might be trying out a new to us brand in the next little while....provided there is still some work right after new years.
Looks like you are having fun. Haven't even had to scrape my truck windows yet this winter. If we ever had conditions like you have the whole of southern England would grind to a stop. Graham
Hi Graham, well the last month and a half I've been feeling a bit burnt out or run down my health hasn't been the greatest I just finished ten days of antibiotics to kill a sinus infection.....hoping that works too. I've had a multitude of issues with the old Hitachi one of them being fuel issues but I think we worked them out. And we had the main bucket pin replaced in the summer when a final drive seal failed by the dealer and a couple little things fixed. But during the one of the ditching jobs I was on before freeze up it spat out the two shims that they put in and was back to being quite sloppy. I had noticed that there were no o-rings or seals on either side of the pin and mentioned it to the boss but not much was said about it. I usually don't mind operating the old bugger but now I'm trenching through frost quite regularly and working with people in the hole it just gets to be too much to deal with. So now we finished our last trenching job for the year (I hope) the old Hitch is at Wajax (Hitachi dealer) and apparently needs all new pins and bushings and got a new radio and antennae. (Yay!). There might be a week or two of brush mulching or cutting, the biggest job being at a golf course that needs some drainage work done. We might have more utility work later in the winter but we usually don't get much warning about that so sounds like it will be quiet for a while.
Not sure but that doesn't look like it's one of the biggest buckets they have up there. Any idea what machine it's for?
I believe it was for a Hitachi EX3600 and not its not for the biggest machine. I've seen when those buckets come through often on the train and the two pieces are shipped separately.