Excavator to remove pine tree stumps? Good Size?

[Al_Smith]

I left my old Oliver OC 6 and the owner of the property would saturate it with diesel fuel and lay a match to it and every few days roll it around using my crawler .

Dang Al, when I first read this I thought he was torching your Oliver. :D

That old Ollie spent about twenty years as a push back dozer in a dump site when they used set the trash afire and push it back two three times a week .I don't think it was ever afire but I don't know .It was pretty rough when I got it and gave it a new lease on life about 35 years ago .

[Bruno of NH]

I was building a house for one of my customers 25 years ago.He was into everything, had a 6 bay mechanic garge,dirt work equipment, buying and selling at auctions. An old Yankee rough around the edges.
Well there was an out cropping of ledge in front of the house.Out comes some Dupont,he drives a John Deere 550 doer over it and sets it off.
The dozer jumped 6ft in the air and the rubble blew out the glass in 3 10' patio doors I had just put in :D
After that when DuPont came out I went to the hardware store :D
He paid in cash
I would get in my truck and see a brown paper bag open it up and it would have $30,000 in 20's in it.
I would go pay my material bill at the end of the week.
The company said no more cash bring a check :D

[SwampDonkey]

I should have did that, Bruno, last summer when building the house. Paid each installment with a certified, shoulda handed him one of his $45,000 cheques in 50's inside a grocery bag. "Here you got a secure place for this?", was always my line as I handed them off each payment and he stuffed his cheques in his pants pocket, and said 'yup'. :D :D And yep, that money wasn't borrowed money.

[gwisejr]

I spoke to the guy who rents the 40HP excavator... Said that it would take a while to dig out those stumps but also suggested that I just grind them down. Said that it would be hard to compact the ground in the holes that I would make and that grinding them down to 12" below grade would have less settling over time as compared to digging them out then not doing a really good job of compacting the area. He recommended using a lambs foot compactor if I do dig them out. 

I did not think about compacting the dirt back in the holes. I had planned on using a plate compactor but it make sense that it would take a long time with that tool and many passes to do a good compacting job. Any thoughts about that? I plan on building a barn in the area and I don't plan on a cement floor, just compacted dirt with a 4-6"  layer of compacted gravel. I'm thinking now that any settling that happens, I can just add some more gravel to the depression. 

Thanks.

[alan gage]

I'd use gravel or crushed rock to fill the holes if I was worried about settling.

Alan

[btulloh]

Crusher run unless you've got some bank gravel on your place

[Jack S]

this thread has made a complete circle with good answers and rabbit trails. I hope you are satisfied with some good advice and please follow up someday on how you made out. I enjoy trying to help but really would  like to hear the outcome later as it would help everybody in making good decisions. Enough said  

[goose63]

There was a guy up north of me ground out the stumps put down a slab built the house and then the snakes moved in to the stump grindings his wife was not a happy camper she left him

[woodhick]

Well I put in my 2 cents.  I live on 10 acres that was completely wooded when I bought it. Mostly Virginia pines and Poplars.  I have pretty much cleared it all and mowing now.  I bought a Rayco 1635 stump grinder to remove the stumps over the years as I cleared it.  Looking back not sure that was the best way to go.  Yard now is extremely rough and I have to retill sections of it every  year to try and get it smooth.  Too many "divits" or sinkholes to go around filling them in so I just till up sections and redo.   The stump grinder will remove the stumps below grade but there will still be a LOT of wood roots and stump left.  In a couple years it WILL cause sink holes.  Definitely would not recommend that approach under any future building.  Again just my experience.  
Woodhick

[Tom King]

45 years experience buiding houses, and roads in wooded land.

Cheapest way is to find a heavy equipment contractor that has the largest excavator around. Cost will be about break even with renting a mini-excavator yourself.  Here, I can get a good operator with a 320 for $125 an hour, and he would finish your job in a day, and do other stuff that I want done because I tell him I'll keep him for a full day, and he comes when he gets the chance by doing so.

Pines have large tap roots, different than hardwoods that have most of their roots on top of the ground.  Grind a pine, and you will be fighting holes for decades-maybe not the first few years, but decades after that.

If you can afford it, fill the holes with Crusher-Run.  If not, tell the contractor to bring a load of clean fill dirt when the truck comes for the stumps.  Often, they need to get dirt off another job anyway.

A plate compactor is good for leveling top dressing on something, like a horse stall base, but almost no good for filling a stump hole.

Cheapest Pine stump hole fill is to tell the operator to pack it the best he can with the hoe, track it down as good as he can, and leave some piled up on top for settling.  You can grade it out level, in a few years.

[barbender]

Things may be different in the hard freezing north country than down south. I would be so bold to say that up here, only a fool would bury stumps where a permanent structure will go. I've worked around too many of these kind of shortcuts over the years and saw the added expense and sometimes unrepairable damage it causes. Buried wood behaves very badly up here, mostly in in the spring when the frost is coming out. It swells and heaves, it might be ok on a woods road etc but anything that will get a slab or asphalt over it, it will be a disaster. Back in the asphalt paving days, we ran into a practice quite a bit that really bit the homeowner- when the property was developed (years before we were paving it), the site contractors often would bury trees and stumps in the driveway...I would've really liked to catch one of those guys in the act and rubbed their nose in the dirt! Once we found that a driveway had debris under it, the customer had 3 options- we could remove it and refill, time and materials. Or, we could quit and leave. And finally, we could continue to prep the job and pave it, but they would have no warranty. I saw jobs where I personally graded it, it was nice and solid. A year later the customer calls us for some repair work, we go look at it and I was ASHAMED of what that job looked like! Cracks 4" wide, actual holes that you couldn't see the bottom of, etc. Apparently, there was wood buried under that grade and it moves in the spring, broke holes the asphalt and water just ran through into what must've been large voids in the buried wood. It wasn't pretty. In short, I'm not much of a fan of stump grinding. There's a time and place (a tight yard that can't be tore up, for example) but imo you're better off getting rid of the stumps altogether. 

[Ianab]

Things may be different in the hard freezing north country than down south. I would be so bold to say that up here, only a fool would bury stumps where a permanent structure will go. I've worked around too many of these kind of shortcuts over the years and saw the added expense and sometimes unrepairable damage it causes. Buried wood behaves very badly up here, mostly in in the spring when the frost is coming out. It swells and heaves

Different problems in a warm climate, but the same end result (problems). Generally pine just rots and settles after 5-10 years, and you get a depression that needs filling in. Burying works OK if it's a back field where it doesn't matter if you get a few dips and humps, but around a house site, it WILL come back to haunt you. 

I second (or is it third) just getting a big excavator in for a day and get-r-done. Whether you truck the stumps out, start a burn pile, or bury them some place out of the way, the big machine will do it in a 1/4 of the time.