walnutman
Gold Member
Yanmar YT 359C tractor.... just picked up a 7' land plane.
We have about a 1/4 mile long dirt/rock road that needed a lot of material due to previous owners not adding but only scraping over 25 years or so.
Had a lot of low spots that held water and coming off the top grade where the water rushes down it was eroding canyons after long hard rains. Nothing new to those who have similar situations.
Decided to start out with 3 (12 ton) loads of road base. (36 ton) total. They also call it flex base which is a mixture of crushed concrete, fines and dirt.. and a little bit of mixed trash
Dumped it on the worst parts. Didn't have the land plane yet but have a box blade.
Box blade worked out OK but as you know it's hard to avoid the ripples.
After those 3 loads my neighbor had some free dirt so I wanted to build up the higher part of the road with that dirt so subsequent layers of rock would raise the whole road.
We had an ice and rain storm after I put the dirt down.. even after it had gotten packed down from driving on it it still turned soft and muddy in that area for a few days.
Decided to purchase the land plane and went on with loads of 1-1/2" crushed concrete on the areas that were soft thinking it would imbed and coalesce with the dirt for a more stable base.
Put down 24 ton of the 1-1/2"
On top of all that we put down 52 ton of flex base.
The problem I was having is.... when grading a hard existing road and re-distributing existing top stone, you can simply drop and float the land plane and the rails ride on the existing hard base as it re-distributes the overlaying stone. Looks beautiful.
Doesn't work that way with 6" of freshly laid stone and gravel.
If I lay the plane down and float it it sinks all the way in as I go and overloads the plane while scraping way too deep digging all the way down to the original road level where it being hard, stops digging.
I'm fortunate to have top and tilt cylinders on my machine which is really convenient.
I'm building technique here to plane out the road without burying the thing.
I try not setting it down all the way which is tricky cause if you are just a little too aggressive it starts to go deep again.
Then I started playing with tilting the front of it up some, then tried tilting the back up some so only either the front blade does most of the work or the back blade.
I found tilting the front up yielded a better depth control.
I've got it pretty good now and wondering that after a couple of months of driving on it and it hardening up tight, the plane will glide with it flat in float mode without digging in.. just scraping the top layer.
Thoughts?
We have about a 1/4 mile long dirt/rock road that needed a lot of material due to previous owners not adding but only scraping over 25 years or so.
Had a lot of low spots that held water and coming off the top grade where the water rushes down it was eroding canyons after long hard rains. Nothing new to those who have similar situations.
Decided to start out with 3 (12 ton) loads of road base. (36 ton) total. They also call it flex base which is a mixture of crushed concrete, fines and dirt.. and a little bit of mixed trash
Dumped it on the worst parts. Didn't have the land plane yet but have a box blade.
Box blade worked out OK but as you know it's hard to avoid the ripples.
After those 3 loads my neighbor had some free dirt so I wanted to build up the higher part of the road with that dirt so subsequent layers of rock would raise the whole road.
We had an ice and rain storm after I put the dirt down.. even after it had gotten packed down from driving on it it still turned soft and muddy in that area for a few days.
Decided to purchase the land plane and went on with loads of 1-1/2" crushed concrete on the areas that were soft thinking it would imbed and coalesce with the dirt for a more stable base.
Put down 24 ton of the 1-1/2"
On top of all that we put down 52 ton of flex base.
The problem I was having is.... when grading a hard existing road and re-distributing existing top stone, you can simply drop and float the land plane and the rails ride on the existing hard base as it re-distributes the overlaying stone. Looks beautiful.
Doesn't work that way with 6" of freshly laid stone and gravel.
If I lay the plane down and float it it sinks all the way in as I go and overloads the plane while scraping way too deep digging all the way down to the original road level where it being hard, stops digging.
I'm fortunate to have top and tilt cylinders on my machine which is really convenient.
I'm building technique here to plane out the road without burying the thing.
I try not setting it down all the way which is tricky cause if you are just a little too aggressive it starts to go deep again.
Then I started playing with tilting the front of it up some, then tried tilting the back up some so only either the front blade does most of the work or the back blade.
I found tilting the front up yielded a better depth control.
I've got it pretty good now and wondering that after a couple of months of driving on it and it hardening up tight, the plane will glide with it flat in float mode without digging in.. just scraping the top layer.
Thoughts?
