1 week straight of ditch cleaning with the Cat 320CLU and 72" ditch bucket, good hours and only 2 minutes from home.
Thanks for sharing, nice looking machine. Darn I can't wait to get back to digging dirt. Getting tired of snow thats for sure. Trbo
Dang, I like where you live, thats beautiful country.
nice pics, seems like everything is too green, what happened to your winter?
nice job!
Nice pics!:drinkup
Winter?!?!? You mean when us West Coasters have to start wearing long sleeved shirts and put our flip flops in the closet? I think that season passed us by 6 weeks ago.
This was also the view from my office all week long, Mt. Baker:
Ron, Tell us why you start at the botton of the ditch and work up stream, the local contractor here started at the top of the ditch and worked down stream last fall, he quit before reaching the end and created a long narrow lake. I just want your thoughts on this as it seemed to me that starting at the bottom would be the right way. Dell
bucket thats a small width bucket for a big machine any reason for that to start at the top or bottom :beatsme it all depends on whats in your ditch ,if you start at the bottom and work up in a ditch with lots of slop in it runs down the part you have cleaned,but then if its fairly firm with not much water its not a problem
i never did very well in geography, B.C. is in Canada right? if it is is your west coast weather comparable to the u.s. west coast weather? i always assumed all of canada had snowy winters. learn something everyday.
X2!
I was told that by the Fisheries jerks we get along the way, as you dig out the muck, the water gets dirty, but the water coming in from up stream is still clean, so it dilutes it "and makes the little fishies smile with glee", it's all personal preference, sometimes I need to see what's coming up along the tracks as I travel and other times I want the water to flush out the "floaters" as I dig, there's lots of variables that come into play. I do have more pics coming up on a ditch I did right across from my house, that was a sweet job, I got to use my own washroom like a civilized ditch pig instead of some one's bushes.
That 72" bucket is for loading trucks from the rear, any larger and you're banging the side boards if the truck is going into a curve when you are loading it. We do have a massive 10 foot bucket for the really big field ditches where the land owners want the material cast onto their land, that one is fun, if I snag a stump on one corner, the boom will snap off, literally.
We get the same weather as Washington state and it's neighbours. Google Earth it my under-edumakated friend.
Love the photos. We are a little south of you and this was from my office yesterday.
looks like fun
Here's yesterday's Tour, right in front of my house, 12 truck loads came out and it hasn't seen a Gradall in 20 years, lots of muck, dead leaves, garbage, gravel, sod and branches came out. I got a lot of compliments from my neighbours on this one, "finally this mess has been cleaned up" was one of them, others I can't type here for fear of being banned again.
The "Tour de Ditch" just keeps going and going, and I am LOVING IT! I love my ditch digger!
Great pics Ron:thumbsup Maybe it is time for change of avatar pic:beatsme
Never!! That will always be my baby. :notworthy A few more pics of the latest art work:
Looks good BobcatRon!Please push all that warm air you have on the coast over the mountains to the east and send it my way!Can't wait to see green grass here like you have! P.S......oh yeah and by the way you can keep the moisture you got this winter,Thanks!!
Halle-freakin'-luyah!!! The Royal Matsqui Roadside Ditching Tour of 2008 has come to a bitter sweet end! All was a success, no fatalities (well maybe Mr. Donald D. Duck) no major complaints, lots of muck and slop was removed and a few pretty girls were flirted with. It sure as hell dragged it's feet though, the Superiors forecasted 6 weeks, but I stretched it to 8 weeks. Here's the fun part; The numbers! 8 weeks, Total of 40 days x 8 hours paid days x $117 per hour = $37,440 in excavator cost. 2 hired trucks, $80 per hour = $51,200 in truck use. 2 flaggers, $25 per hour = $16,000 for traffic control. Grand Total = $104,640 for Road side Ditch cleaning. That was just one side of Matsqui. Next side is in the Fall 2008, also, Sumas Prairie is also being done, now multiply that cost by 4, minus 50% for flaggers and trucks (not needed on some roads) and you get an idea of how much money is spent keeping farmers and drivers from driving over flooded roads!
$25.00 an hour to hold a sign You might get $10.00 and hour tops here... by the way those road don't look the busiest in the world!
I did a tour de ditch of my own back in 2006 with the city of London with our Daewoo 130. They forecasted about 4 weeks of work, we stretched it out to 4 1/2 months of work. When the foreman met me, he liked the work I did so they kept finding more work for me to do. Ditched 5 days a week, about 4hrs a day when you get around city worker lunch and coffee breaks.... oh and spendin an hour goin for brekkie every morning at 9. I miss that life... sittin there just diggin a straight line... with the tunes cranked and the A/C hummin.....
That's what the Flagging company charges them out for, the actual flaggers only make up to $14 per hour with a starting wage of $9.50. We were always required to have 2 flaggers, but 1 was often enough unless there was a busy road that has a posted speed limit of 60 km/h, so every driver did 80-100, then we needed 2 flaggers.
Wow, that was a good life! No brekkies for me unless I was buying and even that had to be at Hooters!
This was my little ditching chariot. It is a no name machine, but it's a wicked little weapon when it comes to digging. The bucket was the only weird part, she came off a 220 Daewoo.
That is a wild looking bucket, were these new ditches or cleaning out existing ones?
We were cleaning out existing ditches, and digging some new ones, as well as doing driveway culverts. Yeah it was quite the bucket. One thing I definately loved though was the Dromone coupler, so when I had to clean up the edge of the road I just flipped the bucket around put it on the ground with no pressure and track down the road to clean up my "snail trail". I normally worked with 2 flaggers (chicks ), a grade man and up to 4 dump trucks. The grade man loved me, once we got a feel for grade I just went on my own and he sat in the truck and popped out every half hour to check grade.
My favourite bucket, all 10 feet of it! This is the slop we deal with on the Feild Ditches portion of the "Tour de Ditch Part Duex", what we refer to as "Huck the muck and Eff it".( I wasn't the one who coined that phrase!) I lay it on the R.O.W and let it dry and let the land owners deal with it later on.
That one hell of a bucket! Don't you just love the smell of mud in the morning, nothin better than stagnet water with rotton leaves and dead fish to start the day... Ahh the smell of money
That's why it's my favourite bucket, it cost the company $8000 to custom build to our specs and you can really see the stick twist when the cutting edge gets caught under a tree root, so all digging is done S...L...O...W...L...Y.
Really what size machine is that on? our 220 size machines and both have 9' grading beams we put on the buckets and have never had a problem with the stick twisting even when you snag it on a stump going wide open
That bucket is on a 320CLU Cat (200 class) A grading beam is different, when I curl the bucket in, that's when the damage can happen, just pulling a beam along isn't too bad as the beam can come loose between the thumb and bucket as it gets hooked, but a solidly mounted bucket can do some real fast damage.
Nice work. Who paid for this job, the township, county ??
The Township aka, City of Abbotsford, aka, "Abbistan".
Haha I love that... Abbistan. I will admit that 10' bucket is quite the unit. The only time I have seen sticks twist is on our 385's when you karate chop the ground to get her to dig.
There is still snow on the ground down here... (Washington State) See you are operating the same machine I have been, you clearing a ditch, im making a trench. Your 320 seems a bit older though.
I really like the looks of the ditch on slide 18. Good foreslope, minimal water laying in the ditch. The rest looks good to. By starting at the lower end you can get your proper depth. Sometimes if you start at the upper end and work your way down, you will find that you could have went deeper or maybe you went to deep. I just find it easier to start at your lowest point, especially if you have a long way to ditch. Just my 02 cents
All your ditching projects look great. The first thing that popped into my head was not to put the slop next to the drain. My thinking was water cant trickle down to the drain becuase it has a small berm to get over now. But maybe this drain is just carrying water away from another spot? Not criticising just curious . :drinkup
It's a 2006 model, new enough for me, better than the old '99 330BL I used for a year, that was a dog.
The whole R.O.W (Right Of Way) has been built up as much as 4 feet over the years since the "Big Dig" in the mid 1980's, so any water will eventually evaporate or just run off into the adjacent land, no one will ever drive over it until the end of the Fall season with mowers and even then they will wait until July of the next year to mow the grass down., hence the expression, "Eff it, just huck it".
Ours was brand new, pretty much, I think it had like 500 hours on it. XD
My muddy ditch cleaning "chariot" and what happens when I get bored and I need a change of ditch cleaning "chores", property owners get this for free, they gain another 20 feet of flat land with a nice slope to the ditch and I gain my sanity back!
this area look really familiar to me is it out by the sumas border xing? nice work btw
Nope, Matsqui, last pics you can see the right side of Sumas mountain where MSG has their Cox road pit.