Boy did I screw up today. We got the first nice weather day we've had in weeks so I decided to take our little BD2G dozer out and do some work on the pond I'm rebuilding. A lot of sand washed in over the years so I still need to take the deepest part down another 4 feet or so. Anyway, I drive out into what is currently a sand pit (until the dam gets rebuilt ) and notice a couple of smallish puddles of water, probably left over from the 2" of rain we had last weekend. I took everything slow to make sure the dozer could handle the slightly damp sand, and everything seemed to go just fine. The dozer had LGP tracks on it and the sand barely gave when I crossed it.
So, thinking everything was good, I started to dig. The sand was actually cooperating with me today and I felt like I was set to make some real progress. In about 5 minutes time I had a pretty good area cut down about 3 feet and was in the middle of making a final pass through the area when I noticed that the sand in front of me was not longer behaving right. There was suddenly an awful lot of water in the hole with me. I quickly raised my blade to dump what I was pushing and was going to high-tail it out when the dozer stopped moving forward. I looked down at my tracks and they were coated with the nastiest grey gumbo I've ever seen. And to make matters worse, the puddle I noticed on the way in were now mostly dry. All the water had seeped through the sand down to where I was working.
The grey goo is what is left of the muck that used to be at the bottom of the original pond before the dam broke and 4 feet of sand washed in over the top of it. It makes a nice seal to hold the water in. We borrowed a friend's trash pump to try to pump the water out of the hole, but the pump gave out on us after just a few minutes. We tried hooking two tractors to the dozer and trying to pull it out, but it just buried the front end that much deeper.
The front of the tracks are covered over with mud and the mud is about level with the center-line of the rear driver sprocket. Since we ran out of time this evening I'm planning to make a run to Tractor Supply in the morning and buy another trash pump. If we can get the water out of the hole, we may be able to get things dry enough to get something under the back of the tracks and get enough traction to back the dozer out. It just happens to be in an awkward position where a larger machine wouldn't easily be able to get to it to pull it out. There's no way it's going forward at this point either. Even with the blade raised all the way it's now sitting on the dirt. If we could move it even a couple of feet it would be back on ground that is solid enough to give it enough traction to pull itself out.
Anyway... This probably isn't directly safety related but I couldn't see that it fit anywhere else. I guess it does fall into the category of machine safety rather than operator safety.
So, any suggestions on how I might go about getting this thing out? We're supposed to get another storm coming through on Tuesday and could get another 2-3 inches of rain, which would probably fill the hole up so far the water would be over the seat. I'll try to remember to take pics tomorrow.
So, thinking everything was good, I started to dig. The sand was actually cooperating with me today and I felt like I was set to make some real progress. In about 5 minutes time I had a pretty good area cut down about 3 feet and was in the middle of making a final pass through the area when I noticed that the sand in front of me was not longer behaving right. There was suddenly an awful lot of water in the hole with me. I quickly raised my blade to dump what I was pushing and was going to high-tail it out when the dozer stopped moving forward. I looked down at my tracks and they were coated with the nastiest grey gumbo I've ever seen. And to make matters worse, the puddle I noticed on the way in were now mostly dry. All the water had seeped through the sand down to where I was working.
The grey goo is what is left of the muck that used to be at the bottom of the original pond before the dam broke and 4 feet of sand washed in over the top of it. It makes a nice seal to hold the water in. We borrowed a friend's trash pump to try to pump the water out of the hole, but the pump gave out on us after just a few minutes. We tried hooking two tractors to the dozer and trying to pull it out, but it just buried the front end that much deeper.
The front of the tracks are covered over with mud and the mud is about level with the center-line of the rear driver sprocket. Since we ran out of time this evening I'm planning to make a run to Tractor Supply in the morning and buy another trash pump. If we can get the water out of the hole, we may be able to get things dry enough to get something under the back of the tracks and get enough traction to back the dozer out. It just happens to be in an awkward position where a larger machine wouldn't easily be able to get to it to pull it out. There's no way it's going forward at this point either. Even with the blade raised all the way it's now sitting on the dirt. If we could move it even a couple of feet it would be back on ground that is solid enough to give it enough traction to pull itself out.
Anyway... This probably isn't directly safety related but I couldn't see that it fit anywhere else. I guess it does fall into the category of machine safety rather than operator safety.
So, any suggestions on how I might go about getting this thing out? We're supposed to get another storm coming through on Tuesday and could get another 2-3 inches of rain, which would probably fill the hole up so far the water would be over the seat. I'll try to remember to take pics tomorrow.
Sounds like tank retreiver time.... Good luck- that can be hard! Had an M-48 stuck to about mid-track once; snapped two 1" steel cables before we got it out... (Course, we were young & stoopid then....)
