Clearing forested land with a backhoe and tractor/grapple

[tony Cecil]

We have a lot of white pine in W North Carolina...Shallow rooted up there ( I think) where as the Yellow Pine down here has a deep tap root.....Be careful with the pines as they `whisper` nicest sound in the woods on a slightly breezy day....I spent a good deal of time in Mass in my youth...Beautiful....Tony

 

[Piston]

I have no shortage of them haha. The only thing behind the trees I want to take down are more trees! I've decided not to clear cut everything but rather clear in 'steps' I'll take down all the smaller stuff so I can visualize a 'yard' better and go from there.

 

[tony Cecil]

I wish you the best, and I think you will be pleased by taking it easy...Sometimes I think I take it too `easy` and don`t appear to be getting anything really done--but then one day it just seems to fall into place...Another thing that happens if you get it too clean is that it is hard to maintain...Mother Nature is relentless until you make a mistake, then she is very slow to correct it Tony

 

[georgia jeff]

I just got back from vacationing in NH. It is a beautiful state. Hope everything goes well with your project.

 

[Ductape]

I just got back from vacationing in NH. It is a beautiful state. Hope everything goes well with your project.

Shoulda called me........... I'da given you the tour !

 

[Taylortractornut]

When I first started running a TLB which dad made mandatory before I started on an excavator full time. We had an old 3550 Ford TLB. Its a 75 model with 4 lever control. Dad bought 4 acres and had set me to clearing it. I was 17 and had only rung wobble stick machines. I started on stumps and kull trees. Dad told me al labout using a trees leverage. The first 5 days I never turned the seat back to the loader position. I sat up in the hoe side and would push the smaller trees over then pull the root balls up. Then ease that tree to the side and use my teeth o nthe bucket curled all the way out raking up bigger briar and and the thicker under brush. then swing it to the side. I worked all the way across making a road with a windrow of brush. When I got through I cleaned out a swath the width of the hoes reach radius.


I d turn around and push up a few piles of the loose grubbigns and burn them. we worked around the bigger trees and hardwood and made it like a park. Later I built a rake to go on in place of the bucket and doubled my raking capacity. It works reall well. All the smaller briar and other hard to grub things got brush hogged and then disked in and grass sown.

 

[Piston]

I'm pretty excited to try out the 'new' backhoe. Up until now I've only used the 4 lever controls aside from running an excavator for a few hours of my life.

The old Dynahoe we have now is the 4 lever design, it's slow but it's a beast. We'll be selling that one as soon as we get the 410.

I'm glad you mentioned building a rake because I was just looking at the ratchet rake and interested in how well it works. Seems pretty simple to build so instead of buying one I'm gonna go buy a big piece of angle iron and make it myself.

 

[Piston]

I was searching the internet for some more 'land clearing' threads that I haven't read yet and came across my old thread. I thought it was ironic that I last posted in this thread exactly a year ago tomorrow. I figured I would update it for the heck of it.

I ran into a lot of issues with getting the land, the town put me through the ringer but I've made a lot of progress. My wife and I decided that instead of building a cabin, we will build our new home on the land and move there permanently.

After a long battle with the town I'm finally making progress, actually the planning board meeting is tomorrow and I should know then if everything is going to work or not. I don't think I'll run into too many more obstacles but you never know.

My plan is still about the same for clearing the land, it's just been delayed a bit. As long as the land is in my name by mid April or so, and it's dry enough to bring equipment up there, I'll start with some inititial clearing. I'll work at clearing the lot and putting in the driveway over the next year, and we are hoping to start building the following year. With any luck, I'll be posting some pics of my progress, I'm keeping my fingers crossed

I may as well include a pic of the new backhoe I'll be using.

 

[Piston]

I was searching some old "land clearing" threads again, and realized I never did update this thread. I figured I'd post some pics of a few days of clearing I did.

My wife and I finally own the land after a lot of back and forth with the town, but we won, persistance paid off! 31 acres to call my own.

My dad helped me a lot with the clearing, I let him play on the tractor almost the entire time, and I was on the ground, sometimes running the chainsaw, but a lot of times just watching, we like to let the machine do the work :laughing:

We first had to get the tractor back into where I wanted to start clearing, so of course we needed some sort of access. The woods are too thick to simply drive the tractor through. We started off making a small road to the area I wanted to clear first.









That is most of getting the "road" in. It tooks us a half day just to get back to where we wanted to start. We picked our way through the woods using the easiest path we could find. I didn't measure how long the trail was, but probably close to 600' or so. I wasn't able to get the backhoe up there yet but the little tractor did quite a fine job considering it was working alone.

I'll post some more pics in the next post.

 

[Piston]

Here are some pics of the start of the clearing. All in all, my goal for this initial clearing, was to open up the land enough to get a good idea of where the best location to put a house will be. I figured I'd clear about an acre and thin out the rest, then go from there, not just clear cutting everything I see.

The woods were thick, most of it was smaller trees that were able to be pushed over with the tractor. We would push a number of trees over, then carry them to a pile. It took a while before we had enough land cleared to even make a pile.








You can start to see the small trail we made, to get up to where we started the clearing. In the first pic below, you can see the tractor through the trees, and see the clearing starting to open up. I took the second pic just by turning to the right about 45 degrees or so with the camera.




The grapple makes fast work of tree and brush material handling.


It was mostly all softwoods, but for the hardwoods, I cut them into sections and piled them to be processed into firewood later on.


This is a pretty good series of photos showing how much of the work was done. We would knock the tree over with the grapple and once it was almost down, and only held up by the remaining roots, we'd back up, then insert the lower part of the grapple under the uprooted stump, and lift and drive forward at the same time. This would free the stump/tree from the ground, then cut it in half or thirds if need be, and take it away.



Here comes my grandfather through the woods, bringing us each a sandwich and a couple cold beers :thumbsup: (He turned 94 TODAY! God bless that guy!)


It's starting to open up a bit now. That pile is going to be fun to burn this winter.


My dad really started to have some fun when I gave him my Bose noise cancelling headphones and put on some Dave Matthews for him. He was really having a good time.