Dirt Moving Just dont do it.

Jstpssng · Oct 23, 2018

I'm sure that it depends on your soil. My father used a subsoiler to bury about 300 feet of phone line and it worked great, but he was going out across his lawn, then an old garden. He welded a piece of pipe to feed the line through and it buried itself as he drove along.

LukeDuke30 · Oct 23, 2018

luckyme2010 said:
Maybe the plow head shoulda went first with no subsoiler to loosin up the ground. I dunno. My ground is clay and sand.

Maybe a subsoiler head to break it up, then switch to a middle buster to get the trench? I bought the subsoiler shank/shoe for mine in case I needed it.

luckyme2010 · Oct 23, 2018

That's what I did I used the subsoiler first but the dirt just rode over the plow head afterwards it didn't pull it out of the ditch. Either way if theres a next time and I'm hoping there wont be there'll be a ride on trencher waiting to do it the easy way.

shooterdon · Oct 23, 2018

LukeDuke30 said:
I used a middle buster for 4'' corrugated drain pipe off the gutters. It took about 3 passes each trench. I did 8 trenches with it, and it was in some tough clay. It worked great, and saved me hours of work. The key for me was having the right angle, and making deeper passed each time. The middle buster was on sale at Rural King for $110. It was the older yellow king cutter version, and they were switching to the red RK by King Cutter version. Below is a short video of the first pass the day I first used it.

Not sure how deep you could go with it, but it sure looks a lot easier than hand digging a trench. I paid $250 to have a guy with a BH on a Kubota come in and put in a 2 ft dep trench about 75 yards long for a power line.

BTW, I have read of guys who only go down a foot for a power line, but that will not pass codes here and I would not do it anyway. OK for a sprinkler line.

flusher · Oct 23, 2018

You're right. 24" is way to deep for that TSC subsoiler. When a I was digging trenches for my new house in 2005, I rented a walk behind Ditch Witch trencher from Home Depot for $125 per day. Dug about 1100 ft of 24" deep trench in 9 hours.

Good luck

LukeDuke30 · Oct 23, 2018

Yep, I was able to get about 9-10'' which was fine for drain pipe and probably other smaller cable.

RSKY · Nov 4, 2018

I used a subsoiler to bury 1/2" PVC water pipe for about 220' with two gentle S-curves. The pipe was attached to the subsoiler and I was walking back and gluing four 10' sections at a time on the end. Depth varied from a foot to four inches depending on roots. This was with a 22-hp tractor. I couldn't feed the pipe thru at the tractor but had to put the entire run thru. At the end I was pulling the entire 220'.

Oldpath05 · Nov 4, 2018

They say a picture is worth a 1000 words but I say a video doubles that and more. This thread has all the ear marks of not enough youtube research. After seeing "Just dont do it." several times I had to click on it and find out what I'm not supposed to do and after I clicked on this thread I still had to go to youtube and find out what I'm not suppose to do, then after I watched a couple youtube videos I now know why what where. A subsoiler is just a shovel in hand helper at best, maybe if they had higher fins on them to move dirt up and out of the way might help, certainly room for some redneck engineering improvements.
How to Use a Subsoiler - YouTube

zzvyb6 · Nov 4, 2018

I've done deeper trenches when I leave the tongue jack down on my hay mower. Seems like this unit would benefit from some wings added to lift the soil out of the trench. Or some other method of lifting the dirt (like a trencher does).