Grading Help with a bulldozer

[csharpe5097]

I want to make a road thru my birch swamp. What kind of dozer should i buy. I am going to have to push down alot of trees and not get stuck in the mud.

 

[rmk700]

Cat D6 widetrack

 

[DJ54]

A winch would really be nice too...!! All of ours had them, and were real life savers at times..!!

 

[csharpe5097]

Thank you

 

[EddieWalker]

What are you going to do after you push them over? Getting them on the ground is easy, getting them out of the way is where the work begins.

I have a Case dozer that is similar in sized to a Cat D6. I have 170hp and it weighs 40,000 pounds. When it gets stuck, your life just got REALLY BAD!!!!!!

When I first bought it, I was pushing over trees like crazy. After creating a massive mess, it took me two years to clean it all up. Now I've learned NOT to do that again.

My prefered method for clearing trees is to take them down with my backhoe. I dig around the roots and push the who tree over. Then I drag or use my grapple to carry the tree out of there and to my burn pile.

An excavator is better for taking out trees, but it's not so good at getting them to the burn pile. The backhoe is a good compromise machine that will do it all. Get 4 wheel drive and a 4 in 1 bucket if you can afford it.

Eddie

 

[Gordon Gould]

You didn't say what kind of road you want to build or how big your tress are. That and your buget would determine what you could go with for a dozer.

I have a little Dresser TD7G that I use for woods roads. It does pretty well for what I want to do as far as pushing smaller trees and popping rocks and is fairly manuverable in the woods. It weighs about 15,000 lbs.

Make sure you know what you are going to do the the stumps and root balls before you start. They mount up and get in your way fast.

 

[Hooked_on_HP]

When you take any type of equipment into a swamp it is easy to get stuck. An excavator or track loader with a winch will be the easiest to get unstuck. Swamps are also hard on tracks and rollers.As Eddie mentioned geting the trees down is the easy part. How big are the trees.
Bill

 

[Bigfoot62]

I want to make a road thru my birch swamp. What kind of dozer should i buy. I am going to have to push down alot of trees and not get stuck in the mud.

Instead of buying a machine, you would probably come out way ahead, if you just hire a contractor to do the job.

As already pointed out, knocking down trees is the easy part.

 

[Jerry/MT]

I want to make a road thru my birch swamp. What kind of dozer should i buy. I am going to have to push down alot of trees and not get stuck in the mud.

How do you plan on dozing a road in a swamp? You'll need a way to bring fill in that you can push out to make a road.

I've see trackhoes work in a swamp and they used decks made of railroad ties that they put down to support themselves. They build up a roadbed from material they dig up from the swamp and then move the decks ahead and work on the next section.

 

[csharpe5097]

I have a kubota L4240 with a backhoe and i figured i could knock the trees down with the dozer and move them with the backhoe. Im not sure about the fill. Any ideas would be appreciated.

 

[Yooper75]

This is a huge project you are taking on, I helped my friend work on a road through a swamp to his deer blind using a John Deere 450C dozer and 310G backhoe. We put two years into it working on it off and on before he finally said enough after many hours and a few hundred gallons of diesel. We also regraveled a road for his parents with the same dozer and it took us a full day with three of us. Me running the dozer, my friend loading with the backhoe, and my friends cousin hauling with a Chevy C60 with a 5 yard box. We spread the gravel 6in deep for about an eighth of a mile and it was a ton of work. Just make sure you want to go down this road(no pun inteded) before you start the job.

 

[csharpe5097]

I just dont know how else to do it. I own the land and want to make it perfect for hunting.

 

[pat32rf]

What part of the country are you in, how far is it accross the swamp, what was the swamp built on, what are you going to be driving on this road,(weight and width) etc?

Ten years ago two of us built 1/4 mile of road accross a cedar swamp just using my JD4300 (FEL) and a couple of chain saws. Took about a month working 40hr weeks. That swamp was built on 1000yrs of beaver droppings but the road was only for occasional use by a pick up truck and Suburban, (Daily ATV or ski-doos) so we were able to make the road base out of corderoy then bucket in fill to cover it.
A dozer would have been useless without a excavator and a fleet of trucks hauling fill.

Built about 2 miles of road that year, mostly thru hardwood ridge country, and billed the customer for 1000hrs of tractor running time. Pretty well paid for the new tractor in 6 months.....plus had the time of my life at my new "job".

 

[Yooper75]

I just dont know how else to do it. I own the land and want to make it perfect for hunting.

Is there a bottom to the swamp? The swamp we were building the road through had a bedrock bottom. If there is no bottom to the swamp the project is over before it even got started. There is really no other way to do it but just remember Murphy's Law and multiply x4 when using heavy equipment it's also not cheap to fix what get's broken either.

 

[csharpe5097]

I live in upstate ny and the swamp has mostly birch trees. There is a foot if black dirt and then pure grey clay. Would an excuvator work better then a dozer. If so what size.

 

[MossRoad]

I want to make a road thru my birch swamp. What kind of dozer should i buy. I am going to have to push down alot of trees and not get stuck in the mud.

Also be sure to make sure you have the proper permits if needed to move soil in a swamp before you buy a dozer. Swamps are usually wet lands and wet lands are usually covered under some laws. The fines could outweigh the cost of the dozer. :confused2:

 

[bcp]

I just dont know how else to do it. I own the land and want to make it perfect for hunting.

Why do you need a road to hunt? Wouldn't cleared trails be good enough?

Bruce

 

[csharpe5097]

I need enough to get my kubota rtv through.

 

[Deere Dude]

What I would do before I would spring for a dozer and find out the swamp is to swampy, hire out a dozer or try your backhoe. If he makes it awhile without any problem you might have him do the whole thing and be done with it.

About 20 years ago I had to put a driveway through some swampy land and I had a guy with a D8 cat, I think it was, to do the work. I was really concerned about him getting stuck as he plowed into it. But he didn't hesitate and he didn't have any problems with it. I had 7 or 8 dump trucks hauling fill that had a lot of 6" to a foot in diameter rocks in it. The trucks would back down the driveway and the cat would just spread it around. After the boney type fill was brought in about 4-6" of road gravel went over the top. I never had a problem with it to this day and I would have bet I would have been sinking all the time.
I don't think it would pay to put dirt as fill, but stoney fill would work. Depending where you are, that might be expensive hauling. I had to haul about 50 quad-axle loads in. Maybe you don't have to go as thick as I did.
Then again, when somebody mentions swampy land, how swampy is that. It might be like quicksand or it may just need a foot or to of solid fill over the top.
If it were me and I had a backhoe, I would get a couple trucks of boney fill and start at the beginning and see how it goes. You should be able to tell how muddy it is before you get in to much trouble. Keep a winch handy and keep us posted.

 

[Gordon Gould]

I have built some sections of corduroy road thru some wet holes using old RR ties that I could get for free. Not nearly as good as a rock base but alot cheaper and plenty good for my tractor. I know a man with a cedar stand that he is cutting. He has made about a hallf mile of corduroy road thru his swamp with cedar slabs and logs to run his tractor and winch on. It is a lot of hand work though.