RDrancher's Photo Thread

[EddieWalker]

OK, that makes sense. Not that I'm very familiar with culverts, but I always look at them when I'm at the store and try to keep a mental note of what they are going for. Have you ever taken out any half or 3/4 filled plastic culverts? I've failed miserably attempting to do this by breaking them into three pieces. Never evenly, but it always turns out to be three pieces that come out. It's all the weight of the dirt inside the culvert, and I'm wondering if there is an easy, or even a difficult way to get them cleaned out first? I'm thinking about using a 20 ft length of PVC pipe to get a rope through the opening, then using the tractor to pull it through with a small plug of some kind to get some dirt out, then doing it again with something bigger and bigger until I get it cleaned out.

When I get the pieces out, I take them closer to the house where I can clean them out with the hose. It takes awhile to get all that dirt out, but it's simple and easy enough.

Eddie

 

[RDrancher]

In response to Kevin's question on the Blooper thread...

As far as my relationship with the machine...I know that "hate" is a pretty strong word, but I double hate the Case. We've had a ton of rain this year so there's mud everywhere. I worked out back at my place for less than fifteen minutes yesterday and spent over an hour cleaning the peanut butter clay out of the undercarriage, mostly from around the final drives and the hydraulic piping to them from the frame. After replacing a drivemotor last year, I'm not about to take a pocketbook hit like that again! When I refer to this machine as the "Fair weather Case", I'm not kidding. The TR series is probably fine for desert or dry work in general, but they're not ready for adverse conditions.

Just to add salt to the wound, while cleaning out the undercarriage a gang of fire ants crawled up the outside of my jeans and bit me in unison around the belt line.

 

[kevin37b]

I would guess that machine is going the route of a boat or pool ?

 

[RDrancher]

OK, that makes sense. Not that I'm very familiar with culverts, but I always look at them when I'm at the store and try to keep a mental note of what they are going for. Have you ever taken out any half or 3/4 filled plastic culverts? I've failed miserably attempting to do this by breaking them into three pieces. Never evenly, but it always turns out to be three pieces that come out. It's all the weight of the dirt inside the culvert, and I'm wondering if there is an easy, or even a difficult way to get them cleaned out first? I'm thinking about using a 20 ft length of PVC pipe to get a rope through the opening, then using the tractor to pull it through with a small plug of some kind to get some dirt out, then doing it again with something bigger and bigger until I get it cleaned out.

When I get the pieces out, I take them closer to the house where I can clean them out with the hose. It takes awhile to get all that dirt out, but it's simple and easy enough.

Eddie

Your pull the plug idea is a good one. I wonder if you could use a length of schedule 80 pvc pipe slightly smaller than the OD of the culvert pipe as a cleanout tool. You could run the rope (I'd use 3/8" cable) through the pvc to a cap at the far end. I'm not sure if a pvc cap could stand the pull, but it'd be easy to pab up a piece of round steel for that.

Edit: Sorry, meant ID of the pipe.

 

[Bladehauler]

We used to run a pvc pipe though the culvert, pull a cable back through with it , tie an old car tire to the cable and the other end to the tractor ,always amazed me how much crap that tire would pull out !

 

[RDrancher]

We used to run a pvc pipe though the culvert, pull a cable back through with it , tie an old car tire to the cable and the other end to the tractor ,always amazed me how much crap that tire would pull out !

Now THATS a great idea!

 

[RDrancher]

Week after week of rain, flooding, hail and tornadoes...I'm sure not getting a lot done this spring!

I did get the surge rock and driveway covered in gravel at the tree guy's place, so at least they have somewhere to park. Lot's of work to do there still, but the ground is too soft to get it done.


This pond is the last in a series of ponds. The outlet pipes dump into a stream bed. At some time in the past the original pipe was filled with concrete and two 15" pipes added. With so much flooding going on around here the two pipes couldn't handle the flow, so the water not only went over the designed overflow, but also took out the driveway closer to the home. There aren't any seep collars on the original or added pipes, so the dam has begun to leak next to the pipes as well. I have a plan to fix the problem later this spring, but the homeowner is hosting a wedding here in the next week and wanted to repair the damaged driveway for now.


The existing base material here is a brownish 3/4" minus with a topping of useless granite peagravel. The base works in some areas, but it doesn't pack very well if it's laid down too thick. I pulled the peagravel and base back, then used 1.5" roadbase for the repair. After compacting the roadbase and spreading the existing materials back over the top, the driveway should be fine for the wedding. It rained pretty hard for about twenty minutes, so I sat it out in the garage.

 

[EddieWalker]

Good thing you are that far West, here in East Texas, it's rained almost every day for the last month or more with another inch and a half this morning and more to come all weekend and next week. We had a wedding at my place two weekends ago and the only way to get there was on the back of a trailer that I pulled with my tractor and four wheelers. You couldn't even walk in the mud it was so bad. I need to bring in hundreds of tons of road base, but it's just too wet and nasty to even think about it. Maybe by August.

Eddie

 

[RDrancher]

Good thing you are that far West, here in East Texas, it's rained almost every day for the last month or more with another inch and a half this morning and more to come all weekend and next week. We had a wedding at my place two weekends ago and the only way to get there was on the back of a trailer that I pulled with my tractor and four wheelers. You couldn't even walk in the mud it was so bad. I need to bring in hundreds of tons of road base, but it's just too wet and nasty to even think about it. Maybe by August.

Eddie

Oh, we've had our fair share. The helicopter water rescues in Krum last week were just five miles from my place. The two guys rescued off the hood of a Chevy pickup were only a couple miles away. Their truck was actually resting against my customer's pipe and cable fence. The train derailment and I35 shutdown were just up the road. I had a two foot deep creek running through my shop a couple of weeks ago when the county's culvert pipes failed to handle the volume of water and the bar ditch overflowed. I've only been able to get 1.5 days of work in the last two weeks.

I have over nine weeks worth of jobs on the board and several of them were scheduled to start in mid March. Pretty much everything has been too wet to complete, so it's not worth starting them. The gravel pits have been closed a few times a week for the last couple of months and forget getting any dirt. That's made it tough to get materials. There's no possible way I can keep up with the new calls (eleven of them before noon today), but I'm still looking at new projects hoping that some are actually doable when it's wet. I'm not complaining...we're extremely blessed to have the work, but I feel for some of my customers that have been slogging through the mud for months.

 

[RDrancher]

I would like to publicly thank my competitors for selecting unsuitable (cheap) material and showing a complete disregard for proper drainage (as usual.) I set a culvert pipe and precast concrete ends for this customer last year. Their builder included the grading and a gravel driveway in the price of the build. They used a couple inches of uncrushed river stone as a base with a few inches of uncrushed peagravel as a topping. Hard to see, but in the third photo the driveway is sloped more than 12" to the right.

 

[dave1949]

Sorry the rain has been holding you down John. On the bright side, the flooding is making more jobs for you if you can get to them eventually.

I'd gladly take some of that rain here.

 

[RDrancher]

It's starting to feel like ground hog day Dave. Every forecast shows a chance of rain for the next seven days....day after day after day. Lots of work though, that's for sure.

 

[dave1949]

It's starting to feel like ground hog day Dave. Every forecast shows a chance of rain for the next seven days....day after day after day. Lots of work though, that's for sure.

There must be a weather pattern stuck over your region. Like the cold that came here and got stuck this winter. It does wear people down mentally when you don't get a break.

 

[RDrancher]

Yep. I think that it's having more of an effect on my wife's sanity than mine. #1...She can't ride her horses in the mud, and #2...She has to put up with more of me! :laughing:

 

[dave1949]

Who else could hear your weather complaints? That's what spouses are for--right?

 

[EddieWalker]

Do you think they used the river rock because it's cheaper? I'm always amazed how often people spend thousands of dollars on the wrong materials when it would have just added a few hundred bucks to get the right material the first time. I see this in homes all the time when they use lumber too small for the span. The next size up is just a couple bucks times the number of boards they needed for grand total of less then $100 they could have done it right the first time. But now they have to spend thousands for me to tear it all out and redo it. Just crazy.

Eddie

 

[RDrancher]

The material is local and cheaper, and the trucking is cheaper too. I see this with a lot of rural home builders since by this time in the project they're trying to get the keys handed to the homeowner, get paid and get out. They include the driveway in the price of the home and then use the same cheapy guys that built the pad out of onsite expansive soil...with a little topsoil mixed in for good measure.

The only materials I purchase from the local pit are sand and small rip rap if it's suitable for the job.

 

[RDrancher]

It finally quit raining, but the first job this week got off to a rocky start. This customer has an easement around a small plot that a local farmer works. I built a new road through the easement a couple of years ago and included a culvert [pipe across the road. Every time the farmer plows the drainage changes a bit, so we decided to grade out a larger swale, install a second pipe and also lengthen the original pipe by two feet. I also touched up the road while I was onsite. The job is only seven miles from my culvert supplier, but with several major water crossings closed near Lake Ray Roberts, it took a seventy mile round-trip to pickup the pipe. That, and the little issue of sinking the tractor the first day turned a simple one day job into two.

 

[RDrancher]

With most of my jobsites still a tad too wet, I headed for this one in sandier soil on top of a hill. The county resurfaced the road and basically eliminated the bar-ditch along the frontage. The change assisted in washing out the customers arena and diverted the flow away from the natural drainage doing damage to the area between their home and barn. Here are the photos of the bar-ditch and graded area. I also regraded the arena and the area above it. I'll post those photos after I place sand.

 

[dave1949]

Is that blue sky I see? Good to hear you are able to get back into your jobs list.