The dirtwork thread

[Patrick NC]

It all has it's place. On the one hand I wouldn't want to be clueless when the technology goes down, but the fact is it increases productivity. Take setting grades- do you want to use an old optical instrument and use 2 people, or push the button on the laser and do it with one? There's no way a person can match the speed and precision of machine laser grade controls. Sometimes it is faster to do the job manually without setting the laser equipment up. I got out of construction before GPS controls were really prevalent in my area, so I haven't worked around those but I'd expect much the same.

GPS absolutely has its place. We have several machines that have it. I always get the jobs that don't have a model to download or grades have been changed rendering the GPS model useless. The average job that we do costs $20,000 or more to have the plans put on a file thats compatible with the machines. If we can save that much money by using the GPS then thats what we do. 

[mike_belben]

Oh its snazzy.. But im just a bum in the woods building one little homestead as i can afford it.    Save money any way i can. 

[Resonator]

One of the big excavator channels on Youtube talked to his friend in the grading business, and had a good selling point for using laser GPS on his equipment. He had to build a pad for a huge distribution warehouse to be built on, and by building the slab base perfectly laser flat, he negotiated a bonus in his contract for how much less concrete would be needed then if the sub base was uneven. And on a big job like that, that can add up, and pay for the GPS.

[PoginyHill]

My previous pics were of the access road to my wood lot from the side I live on. It is a half-mile section of "class 4" town road (town right-of-way, but not town maintained) which was barely passable with an ATV. That section is done. Easily traveled with a pick-up now.

Now I'm working on access from the opposite end. The landing is about 400 ft from a maintained section of road. This would be the access for any equipment or log trucks.

This is what the road looked like before I began work. Here I had just starting clearing the landing. The road was narrow and basically a rocky river bed. Over the years, finer material was pushed to the sides causing a bowl-shaped profile that caught water in the spring and anytime it rained.


  

I cleared alongside the road where my property abuts it.


 

Then I moved material from the cleared path to the road in order to raise its height a bit.


 

This is where I left things last fall. With the leaves gone, cooler weather and rain, it became a muddy mess in the fall and this spring.


 

Fast forward to now. Road dried and packed nicely (clay-type soil). Installed a 15" culvert to direct drain to the right-side.


 

And have begun digging the ditch and raising road some more so that water doesn't run into the road again. Will then line ditch with fabric and stone tailings. Unsure If I'll top road with gravel or leave as is. It may remain dry enough to stay packed and hard without a topping. We'll see.

Finished road in front of my landing. Raised the road 8-18"  from original topped with 3" screen gravel. Seeded landing to minimize erosion and help absorb water from the heavy clay.


 

 

 

[VB-Milling]

@PoginyHill DanG that looks good.  I love seeing transformations like that. Nice work.

[Andries]

That looks like excellent road work, PH.
Well done!
As VB said, the before and after transformation photos are super interesting. Did the drainage work out well?
Also, how many yards of screened material do you estimate to have used to get that distance elevated to the height?
Motor grader, box blade or land leveller on a 3pt. hitch? What was the machine(s) of choice to get that looking so good? 
I'm pesky with all these questions, hey? 

[PoginyHill]

Thanks for the feedback. Labor of love - although picking rocks can get old after a while. @Andries to your questions:

Total of 100 yds (7 loads) for about 400 ft of road 12ft wide. Much of the height I gained using fill from the roadside, making the ditch, and leveling the landing. Had planned for about 6" of gravel to top it. I let the fill settle for several weeks (including some rain). It set up well even with rain and some traffic, so I decided no need for road fabric.

Drainage appears to work well. We've had only 1 downpour since I cut the ditch, but that was before lining it with fabric and stone. Had to shovel out some silt from the culvert and discharge area.

Most of the gravel was tailgate spread. A couple areas could not be tailgate spread, so had a few piles to spread out. I used my Case 310 - pictured earlier in the thread. Back-dragging with a floated blade makes me look like a professional! The blade is quite heavy for its size, so it levels material pretty well.

[mike_belben]

Excellent.

[Andries]

Beautiful work - and done with the most basic of tools.
Good onya! 

[PoginyHill]

Different area than my previous road work. This one is an intersection of 5 woods roads (skid trails). Intersection was poorly placed as it has shallow groundwater and shallow bedrock. It does not freeze enough in the winter for easy passage with a tractor. A lot of road fabric and about 60yds of 3" gravel later and it's done. All pics are the same area from different angles and various stages of work.

First two pictures, I relocated one road to the left so as to not scrape up two decent yellow birch and for a better approach to the other roads (original road went between the two). Took down a few red maples for the relocated section.




 


 


 


The rock is 8" and under crushed rock. I used in for smaller wet areas along roads with shallow groundwater where tractor wheels tend to make a rut.

 

 

[thecfarm]

Nice dump trailer you have.
How do you load that?

[PoginyHill]

Nice dump trailer you have.
How do you load that?

I load it with my excavator. Takes about 10 buckets - 5 yds or so. I load it less if going in a particularly muddy area.
Trailer works well. But I wish it had larger flotation tires. These are 11L-15.

[Roundhouse]

Last weekend I took a couple extra days and got back to my project in the UP. I've posted about this before on other threads before I found this dirtwork thread. At this point it's still heavy on the dirtwork so it makes sense here. In the future I should recap the whole twisted tale on its own.

Basically, I have a lot I bought a half mile down the road from my sawmill lot with an unfinished cabin on it. I'll be moving the cabin and finishing it but it's in the middle of 10 acres with no discernable trail to it (still haven't figured out how they got there to build it with the materials 10 years ago). 90%+ of the ground out here is heavy clay, I'm lucky that the glaciers left me a sand and rock hilltop right next to my sawmill and I'm using that to improve the road on the cabin lot. 

Here is my old reliable Allis Chalmers backwards loader at "the pit". I turn left to take a scoop and turn right to load my dump truck off an earthen berm, about 5 scoops per "load". I had to make my first repair to the tractor this trip. When making my first load a cotter key had gone missing and an arm pin came out of place. With an assist from my forklift I got everything lined back up into place before long.





My dump truck is rather old and tired so I've "de-rated" it to move half loads, I really just want to get it through to the end of this project without a major failure. Here is a shot from one of the trouble spots on the new road. This is where a pair of hemlock trees blew over, roots and all, quite a few years ago. They left a crater that collected water, leaves, etcetera, and created an impoundment with the rootball "wall". I've since ditched the spot to drain and busted up the roots with the forklift yet it remains a soft spot. Here it is with the first 5 loads of sand and rock dumped in position.





Spots like this where I'm not spreading but filling I kept the skid steer handy to spread the fill and shape the road. This spot would ultimately take 9 loads to be decent for driving back and forth on.





One of the big goals of the trip was to get enough fill on the road to reach my larger culvert with the truck. This was the first time getting the dump in here. Up to this point it had been "make do" trips with the tractor and wagon or even smaller means. I want plenty of fill here and the truck is my best way to pour it on. 





Things were going very well until we had a whole night of heavy rain. Needed rain, but not ideal for road building. So I switched gears for a while and worked on the road beyond the cabin (but on the route I plan to move the cabin). I used the skid steer to work on one of the (surprising few) pesky trees that blocked the roadway. Normally this about 12" tree is way out of my machine's league for uprooting and removal but it was located on the side of a shallow hill so I set about digging around and under it. Periodic pokes at the trunk showed a little movement so I kept going. Working on the slope definitely helped and eventually the tree went over. Of course the top got hung up in another and this is where it stopped. I would chain the trunk up high and to the machine, then cut most of the way through, finally pull it all down with the skid steer. I was very happy to get this one out of the way.





Overall the lot is pretty well drained but there are spots like this one along a ridge where it is flat enough for water to settle on the road and not go anywhere. The valley is not far away so I dug this small pool to get the water off the road and am working on a ditch to drain it off into the valley. It's better already and should be long-term solid once the ditch is complete. My fill material from the other lot can be seen in the foreground.





With the road getting dry-enough I was back to hauling sand and rock. When slowing traveling some uneven spots there was a loud sickening bang from the dump truck, followed the crunching and crackling of metal. I feared the frame had given out and my dirt dumping days might be over. Things had definitely shifted when the sagging drivers door opened smoothly and in line with the door frame. Once I inspected what happened the frame was fine (well not fine but at least the same as it had been before), and it was the back of the cab that had come apart specifically the spot welds where the floor meets up with the back wall on the drivers side. Everything still operated normally it just had a horrible grind whenever the truck flexed. The cab mounts and floor were still solid so I implemented a quick backwoods fix to stabilize everything. With a square block of wood inside the cab I lag screwed a couple pieces to the outside, that eliminated all the flexing and grinding and I was back in business.





By the time the sun was going down Monday night the new road was passable as far as the cabin and I was turning around there on my last dump truck runs. All told I brought in 31 loads of sand and rock while I was there plus a few loads using the tractor and wagon. 





It was a nice accomplishment to be able to drive to the cabin for the first time, 10 months ago walking was the only option.





The rain had made puddles that I subsequently filled and although passable they were still leaving ruts due to the water remaining underneath. For the road to set up nicely and dry out I would need to take care of the ruts. Tuesday before I left I ran the new road a few times with my four wheeler and drag. This did a nice job of evening everything out. By mixing everything up and morning moisture the surface looks a lot darker than the topping as I hauled it in. Toward the start of the road here the curve had a soft spot, now leveled if it will set up by next trip I can then finish it by spreading one more layer on top. 





The culvert location. Still a little more depth and width to add but driving over it in a truck feels like a real victory.





Looking the other direction, down the "straight-away". What a great feeling to have your old equipment hold it together (for the most part) and see the progress resulting from a few days of solid work.

[newoodguy78]

Great job on the road 

[thecfarm]

That road fabric is pricey stuff but works. My father and me did a truck road without it. We did not know about that stuff and no one mentioned it either. That gravel is just about gone. It has mixed in with the soil that was there and has sunk just about out of sight. The contractor did my driveway with it, 500 feet. I had a logging truck on it 3 times and you really could not tell.

[Roundhouse]

Happy Birthday cfarm!
I've been impressed with the results I've seen on here from use of road fabric. I haven't used it yet and didn't have any for this project. I did however have some extra rolls of garden/landscape fabric laying around here so I brought those along. I tried them in the wetter areas as a "poor man's road fabric" narrower than road fabric so it went down in two strips. I'll be curious to see if it makes a difference in the better than nothing sense or just disappears into the depths. The traffic shouldn't be super heavy in volume or weight, I don't expect it'll see more than my F350 dually.

[thecfarm]

Thank you for the birthday wishes!!
I use to work at a place that made interior trunk parts, we made some roll goods. It was all made out of plastic, but was like carpet in a house. I got a lot of rejects stuff that was no good for parts. No wider than 8 feet, but was free. That went down a lot for a road on my land. Even under a few raised beds too. Keeps the grass from growing up through.
A layer of rock really helps out on the mud part.  ;D

[Iwawoodwork]

I used old house carpet for road fabric in the work/turn around area behind the house over 25 years ago and it has worked great, the soil was red clay/ hard when dry but real soft and slick when wet, of course it was wet when time to gravel.

[Patrick NC]

Here we are repairing another failed walmart parking lot in Henderson NC. 

On this one we removed the broken up asphalt and are mixing Portland cement into the top 16" of stone and dirt at a rate of 60lbs per square yard. Basically turning it into a 500psi concrete slab. 

[Don P]

Cool, that's a recipe to keep in mind.

I need some fill to build an entrance into the bottom and fill some low areas down there. For at least the bulk of it being rocky fill is a benefit so I went over to the far end of our property where there is a rock rookery. This is a place where rocks come from. It's the foot of a cliff that's about 80' tall but If I were able to dig level from here to the base it would be twice that tall. This is everything that has tumbled down. I guess for that matter I've never found the bottom of the pile either. I'm not gonna run out of rocks  :D.


 
I'm going to leave that one till i have a need for a 15' rock.


 

[mike_belben]

Stacked on pallets turned to baskets via wire fence, those weathered surface boulders are sellable, especially in NC triangle, charlotte or the richie lakes of southern pisgah end.  

They need to be sorted by size class.. Typically called 1man, 2man etc.  As in how many old men to pick it up.  A bit larger than a bowling ball is a 1man. 

[doc henderson]

check with old road construction companies.  some states call for it (Ok) and others do not.  they built some real cheap roads in the Obama years.  I got 4 rolls 14 feet wide and 300 feet long for about 50 bucks a roll.  I have used some, and sold it by the foot.  I still have 2 rolls left.  we used it as landscape fabric.  can barely cut it with scissors to add a plant, so my wife hates it.

[mike_belben]

Was $500 a roll a few years ago, probably 800+ now

[Patrick NC]

Was $500 a roll a few years ago, probably 800+ now

There's 2 different types sold by weight per square yard. The cheap stuff is $650 per roll and the expensive stuff is over $1000

[doc henderson]

this was a DuPont product and new it was thousands a roll (my brother sometimes over estimates)  but the left over stuff, the co would sell to employees for not much.