Gary Fowler
Super Star Member
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2008
- Messages
- 11,998
- Location
- Bismarck Arkansas
- Tractor
- 2009 Kubota RTV 900, 2009 Kubota B26 TLB & 2010 model LS P7010
I dont think a 10# hammer would damage these rocks. A 4000# tractor with a backhoe takes a bit of digging around to move some of them. You know you have a big one when the teeth of the backhoe just scrape across the top without any movement of the rock and the tractor is lifted off the ground. Sometimes if you arent fast on the controls, that will give a pretty good back bone jar when it slides off the rock.
I have dug out a few with pick and prybar, used the FEL on the LS to get some of the larger ones, but the back hoe is the greatest tool ever invented for a tractor. Big rock but only a small hole whereas with the FEL, it looks like you are prepping to bury a horse to get out a 2 foot diameter rock. My bucket on the FEL is over 6 feet wide so that is the minimum width hole when digging out a rock with it. Yesterday when digging out the cluster of rocks, the hole was about 2 feet wide x 3 feet deep and 6 feet long. Still plenty of rocks left when I stopped. It will take years for the ones down 3 feet to pop up. Here the rocks seem to be bunched together. This vein continued past where I stopped but was only a couple feet wide. To each side was just dirt, but I dont know how deep the vein goes. The two that I have dug out to date, just kept going down, but we always stopped about waist deep. The deeper you go the harder and more compact the rocks are, near the surface they are laid in like stacked bricks(large stacked bricks) but can be broken up and removed with the hoe. As you go deeper, they dont have the cracks separating them into smaller pieces. Up on the hills we have these rock veins, while in the low lands about 4 feet deep, we have solid soft shale rock. I dont know how thick that layer is either but some of the shale pits here go down 30 or more feet. There is one shale pit where the shale is exposed on top of a ridge and the guy there dynamites it to loosen it up. Shale deterioates when exposed to sunlight so it is a cheap, temporary road base but if used as a base and covered with other material, it works well. I have dug up a bunch and used it for placing in a creek to make a low water crossing and dam. It holds pretty good for that.
I have dug out a few with pick and prybar, used the FEL on the LS to get some of the larger ones, but the back hoe is the greatest tool ever invented for a tractor. Big rock but only a small hole whereas with the FEL, it looks like you are prepping to bury a horse to get out a 2 foot diameter rock. My bucket on the FEL is over 6 feet wide so that is the minimum width hole when digging out a rock with it. Yesterday when digging out the cluster of rocks, the hole was about 2 feet wide x 3 feet deep and 6 feet long. Still plenty of rocks left when I stopped. It will take years for the ones down 3 feet to pop up. Here the rocks seem to be bunched together. This vein continued past where I stopped but was only a couple feet wide. To each side was just dirt, but I dont know how deep the vein goes. The two that I have dug out to date, just kept going down, but we always stopped about waist deep. The deeper you go the harder and more compact the rocks are, near the surface they are laid in like stacked bricks(large stacked bricks) but can be broken up and removed with the hoe. As you go deeper, they dont have the cracks separating them into smaller pieces. Up on the hills we have these rock veins, while in the low lands about 4 feet deep, we have solid soft shale rock. I dont know how thick that layer is either but some of the shale pits here go down 30 or more feet. There is one shale pit where the shale is exposed on top of a ridge and the guy there dynamites it to loosen it up. Shale deterioates when exposed to sunlight so it is a cheap, temporary road base but if used as a base and covered with other material, it works well. I have dug up a bunch and used it for placing in a creek to make a low water crossing and dam. It holds pretty good for that.
