Grading Help with a bulldozer

[plumbstraight]

if the trees are not bit enough to sell, use them for puncheon. Use a medium size excavator with a thumb and lie the trees in front of you as you build the road. They will give you the flotation you need and will be a base for the rock. Built many a mile in cedar swamps this way. Works good enough for logtrucks to drive on.

 

[csharpe5097]

I am looking to buy a mini excavator with a thumb. Which one is the strongest.

 

[Grandad4]

An RTV is comparatively light and you'll only go in there occasionally. It would sure save you a lot of work and expense if you could overlay some railroad ties and a layer of coarse material instead of bringing in heavy equipment. Still don't know how much road you need to build. That will determine if it's even practical to do a road in the first place.

 

[csharpe5097]

It will be about a mile but its not all wet. What about a mini excavator. If so which one is strongest.

 

[Grandad4]

About how much is wet? If it's more than, say, a few hundred feet, the cost and time involved in building it could overwhelm you. Seems to me you really need to get specific regarding the details here (not to us, necessarily, but definitely to yourself)... how many feet of "wet" ground? Seasonally wet, or all the time? To what depth? Source of water? Flowing or stagnant? Until you come up with a construction plan, all the equipment deliberations are kind of academic since you don't specifically know what the work will be.

Without knowing the details, all the helpful advice people might provide is simply guesswork. I can't comment one way or the other about a mini-ex in your situation, for example, because I have no clue how many yards of muck must be replaced with fill. If you are moving 100 yards or less, sure the mini would be great, but if it's really 1,000 yards, well you need something bigger, or it'll take years to get done.

 

[rmk700]

It will be about a mile but its not all wet. What about a mini excavator. If so which one is strongest.

Do you really need to buy one? Why not just rent one to help get your road built?

Most top brand Mini Ex's will do you good.

 

[Ford tractor]

We go a mile of timber road to get to our land. Then a couple miles of more timber road on the land. It get's real expensive real fast.

A foot of dirt over wet clay is what I have and it's totally bottomless in the spring and summer if it's been raining. After freeze out, it would be easy to sink a dozer - and I mean out of sight under ground!

You will need to clear the trees and peel back the soil. The soil will decomp and settle leaving pot holes and other nasties. Then you will need to add solid fill at least 2x wider than the width of the machines and at least 1 foot above the high water level at the edges and 1.5ft at the center crown. As the base is clay and will be wet, you should put down the thick plastic material that helps spread out the load. If it's always wet there, you may need to put down the plastic.

If you don't understand water flow, you need to learn about it. A great solid road in the fall with poor drainage or that blocks drainage can become a sink hole or bottomless mire in the spring. i've proven that a couple times!:laughing:

 

[crazyal]

Not sure where you live but around here in the swampy areas if you remove the trees you also remove the roots and make a much bigger swamp.

 

[foreman Etexas]

LiftKit,Tires(or Tracks) and a really good Winch:thumbsup: found this pic

 

[csharpe5097]

Thanks guys. I just thought i could use the excavator to help with putting the trees down to make my road on. How do i put a pic on my profile.

 

[teg]

...How do i put a pic on my profile.

Click on "My Home" either the top of the page or the bottom of every TBN page.

On the left hand side, Look for... (Actually, try just clicking here) Edit Avatar

 

[slowzuki]

We have ground just like the last two pictures. To build roads in it here, the trees are cut, a large excavator (20 tons) with grapple pulls all the stumps and piles them on the road area then scoops dirt from both sides and piles it on top of the stumps. The sides become ditches and the road bed becomes elevated. A dozer levels it off roughly.

The elevated area has to dry for about 6 months as the clay takes forever to setup. Once it is hard, a finer grade is dozed and a skim of gravel to keep the clay from sticking to tires too bad is put down with a grader or dozer.

The road lasts about 15 years before decay from the stumps requires some fill material.

 

[csharpe5097]

Does anyone have any concerns with the volvo e35 mini excavator. That is what im looking to buy for my land. Any feedback good or bad would be appreciated.

 

[PILOON]

Some 30 yrs ago our association decided to build a road to access our chalets.
Road builders balked at crossing swampy area saying it would take endless loads of rock fill to create a base.
Thinking if man could walk on snow with snow shoes why not shoes for a dozer?.
We cut all the trees in the proposed passage and laid them across the road bed.
Dozer then was able to cross to bog and then pushed the far side material to bury the tree bed.
Later the base was extended to about 2/3 feet thick and gravel finished.
To this date when a filled 10 wheeler drives on the road it still jiggles but holds up.
And we were actually able to get the road 'donated' to the city to enjoy full municipal benefits.
As I speak (write) the city is adding recycled asphalt to all our hills with a grader and 12 wheel loaded trucks crossing that 'swamp bridge' about every hour or so.

 

[Grandad4]

Does anyone have any concerns with the volvo e35 mini excavator. That is what im looking to buy for my land. Any feedback good or bad would be appreciated.

You started this thread asking about a dozer. Now you want a mini-ex. There are at least 18 messages, by my count, in this thread giving advice and raising caution flags that building trails in a swamp is difficult, time consuming, can be expensive and can go haywire in a big way. Seems like you are really focused on the equipment question. Well, fair warning about the project and I'm sure everyone wishes you all success with it. I wish I could tell you more about mini-ex's. I've used a Deere/Yanmar, thought it worked great and have heard the Kubota KX models are top notch. Others will no doubt have more expert advice.

 

[lilranch2001]

You started this thread asking about a dozer. Now you want a mini-ex. There are at least 18 messages, by my count, in this thread giving advice and raising caution flags that building trails in a swamp is difficult, time consuming, can be expensive and can go haywire in a big way. Seems like you are really focused on the equipment question. Well, fair warning about the project and I'm sure everyone wishes you all success with it. I wish I could tell you more about mini-ex's. I've used a Deere/Yanmar, thought it worked great and have heard the Kubota KX models are top notch. Others will no doubt have more expert advice.

He does seem to have his convictions

Good luck with your project

 

[snowjoker]

If you don't have any experience running that equipment, and by reading your posts seems to be true, I don't want to burst your bubble but you better just hire it out. Because when you bury any of that equipment it will cost more for you to have someone come get you out than it will to just have someone who knows how to run the equipment safely do the job your intending to do.. Ask the guy not too far from me who had rented a very large excavastor and decided to play in the creek.... needless to say i heard it cost a million bucks to recover it since it was in a hole so deep the boom was all the way up and you still could not see the machine... plus when it flooded the machine was dead... im still trying to find someone with the pictures to see it for myself. but plenty have told me the same thing. Good luck because if you buy a machine you will be needing it !

 

[Kyle241]

cssharpe5097, just my advice if you are interested. I have a similar situation as you do however it's not a mile long, more about 1/4 to maybe a 1/3 of a mile. My 'swampy' area is not swamp but deep peat and thick with cedars, white cedar, poplar, red maple, some elm and ash. I was also in your position last year and hired a dozer guy to come in and make a trail through it after I had cut everything down and move all the logs/leafy material out of the way. All that was left were stumps. The guy said he could do it in a couple days and that he wouldn't get stuck which was my big concern (there is no way to get big equipment back there). So he tried and failed and nearly got stuck. So he backed out and at least was savvy enough to know when he was defeated. So this past August, I went in with my old B20 tractor and pulled a number of stumps out of the way (mistake on my part, should have just cut them to ground level) with the plan to go with a corduroy road. The reason for me going this way was that I dug down in the peat to determine depth and possible fill required and some places were 24"+ so that was out of the question as cost would be prohibitive. So far I have the corduroy road only about 150ft in but it works really well for my needs which is getting my 7000lb tractor to the rear of my property cut trails and just manage the back part of the property. Now I am doing this currently all by myself and have given myself 10mths to do it as I know it's going to take that long. I could hire a few guys to come in build the corduroy road which is another option but I'm going to have a hand at it myself as I enjoy doing this type of work.

As for the equipment you are asking about. I also considered a dozer initially and then had nightmares of getting it stuck back there with no way to pull it out. Note my trail is not going through swamp, just a low area that collects water in the spring but the soil content is such that it will not hold a lot of weight. I then thought of buying a used excavator, a big one, that I know could do the job faster and easier than I am doing it. As a newbie with that type of equipment, I could see myself getting it stuck as well and that would be worse than a dozer. I know they can get themselves out of places much easier but perhaps my lack of experience would prevent this. So then I thought of a mini-ex which is what you are currently thinking of. Luckily my Kubota dealer was nice enough to loan me one for a long weekend, KX91, and it was a great machine. It plucked out trees and had a thumb so I could pick them up and move them but it also was heavy and started to bog down in the trail as of course it rained heavily on the weekend. So while it probably could have done the job well, it was not the solution for me in the end. I would consider renting it however as I plan to cut a lot of trees this winter for the corduroy road and then continuing in the spring and it would come in very handy to move the logs into position (been doing it by hand and it's tiring work!).

I guess I am saying is I understand your dilemma and your desire to do it yourself. You do need to do some careful thinking of what makes sense for you. Based on your desire to get an ATV back there, I would go the corduroy road method if it was me. Also if you buy or rent a mini-ex, make sure it has a hydro thumb. Good luck!

 

[radioman]

After seeing your pics- I am more inclined to say, leave it alone. I would only bush hog it down during dry summer and hunt in middle of winter. My father has similar land like yours and we don't touch it in spring, early summer or fall. We would cut the trees for wood down in winter using snowmobile and tow wood chunks to drier land for spring pickup. You MIGHT be able to create a road for your RTV using wood slabs for a road.