best method for straining junk out of dirt?

[aardvark]

What can be used for straining junk out of dirt? By junk, I mean small pieces of broken wood, broken bricks, broken PVC, rocks, sticks, roots, dead plants, etc. I recently knocked down an old mist house which was very run down, and had a tree fall on it during hurricane Jeanne. I moved all the large debris out and it's been picked up and hauled away, but now I'm in the cleanup and details stage to finish the project. I have alot of topsoil left over which has gotten pushed around, and is filled with junk from the mist house.

What I *used* to do, was to shovel the dirt by hand into my mesh landscape trailer, and then pull the trailer around the yard with the lawn tractor. However, now that I have the BX and FEL, the landscape trailer method is just too slow, and the BX loads way too much at a time for all the dirt to make it's way through the mesh. I figured I needed larger holes to speed things up, so I got an old cot frame which the previous owners of this house left when they moved out. Straining the junk out of the dirt through the cot frame was faster, but about half the stuff I wanted to catch went through the wires on the frame, and the other half clogged up the dirt flow the same way the landscape trailer would get clogged. If I hit the cot frame with a shovel, by hand, the dirt would fall through, but still that's slow, and half the junk would go through with the dirt.

Does anyone make a vibratory strainer of some sort? I figure if I could vibrate the mesh landscape trailer really fast then the dirt would flow out, and it would allow me to walk away and do other stuff while it's running. I guess I could build something to vibrate the trailer, but I'm sure there has to be some simple solution I'm overlooking.

Anyone? Thanks.

 

[rebelmedic]

Sounds like any method will be time consumeing. Perhaps a frame of 2x4`s or 2x6`s with a piece of hurricane fence stretched across will work.If mesh is too big can use two pieces of fence and off set from first to create smaller openings.Chicken wire can also be used if the heavy wire is not required.Which ever is used be sure to secure the wire to top of frame due to dirt weight will pull wire lose if on the bottom.

 

[ronjhall]

Here a thread that should help.
Click Here

 

[To20Chris]

I was thinking of the same thing while I was grading a bank last weekend. How about streching a screen over the bed of a pick-up and unplugging a few sparkplug wires to make it shake?! /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

 

[gabby]

I remember watching brick masons screen their mortar sand with a 4x8 wooden frame covered with hardware cloth. They would tilt it at a 45 degree angle and shovel the sand onto it and let it filter out underneath. The foreign objects would tumble down the sloped hardware cloth to the bottom. The tilt was the key.
Gabby

 

[JJT]

What's a mist house?

 

[aardvark]

Thanks for the info. I hadn't thought about putting it at an angle, I'm going to try propping up my cots today and see what happens. If not, I'll build something. I went and looked through the previous threads, and the shaker system is similar to what I had thought of. Basically I was thinking of an offset mass mounted to an axle that is mounted to a frame on springs. OR, an axle with a cam lobe that lifts and drops a frame once every revolution of the axle.

JJT, the mist house is similar to a greenhouse I guess. It's a structure that lets light through, and has mist nozzles in the ceiling to water plants. The one built by the previous owner of my house was constructed of 4x4's with patio screen stapeled all over it. All walls and the roof were screen. The misters are the typical misters for PVC tubing. The plumbing was hooked into an outdoor faucet line which was near by, with valves to turn the misters on and off. The floor was dirt. Not real complicated.

 

[Currmudgeon]

A couple of things come to mind. Raking through the junk with a box scraper with the tines extended out the bottom, using just the tines to stir the junk, will fish out the bigger stuff.

Raking the junk with a landscape rake, perhaps with half the tines removed, should help pick the middle sized stuff out.

In either case, you'll have to work the mess back and forth to separate the junk from the dirt.

I did this with the landscape rake with all the tines on, to get the cut brush and roots out of my dirt after chisel plowing and chain pulling a brush thicket. I then either pushed the brush to the burning pile, along with a fair amount of dirt, or pitchforked it into the bucket with still a bit of dirt.

If you want to sift the dirt, you'll want to make a grizzly. At your scale, a frame of 4x4s with the sieve at a 45 degree angle, as others have suggested, would be about right. The sieve itself should be fairly heavy material. Maybe chain link fence fabric will work. You can make a heavy grate from 1/4 x 1-1/2 inch flat bars, spaced about 1-1/2 to 3 inches apart with threaded rod and pipe spacers, or by welding. Then you can use your FEL to shovel dirt through the grizzley, then to shovel the clean dirt from underneath. You'll want to size the contraption so you can easily get under it with your loader bucket.

On a smaller scale, I scavenged a sheet of expanded metal grate from the scrap yard, bent flanges onto it so it sits atop my FEL bucket, and shovel sand through it. It works pretty well for wheelbarrow loads of dirt.

 

[normde2001]

Have you tried just loading up the mesh landscape trailer and washing it down with a hose or pressure washer, kind of like panning for gold?

 

[Taylortractornut]

I tear down alot of old houses and such usually burn them in piles and bury them onsite, but i get some i have to haul off so I fill push them into piles and load with the backhoe and thumb. on the little stuff that left ill take and push into its own little trashy topsoil piles. I haul them behing the shop and mound them up. In about a year the vegetation and wood all turns into nice topsoil. On some things I have an old conctrete mixer i set up with a pto drive and I cut one side out and put in some mesh wire. I turn the tractor on and let it run the drum and ill take the backhoe or excavator and load it. It screans out all the trash its a litte small scale right now but im thinking of making a bigger one out of a 300 gallon steel tank.