westcliffe01
Veteran Member
Recently, I helped the a farmer friend move a boulder out of a field he has been trying to use for a cash crop. There was about 3" of the boulder sticking out of the ground and of course every year he would hit it with something causing damage. I had loaned him my Bobcat B200 but he is not really much experienced with earthmoving equipment and consequently he went to play with something easier than this particular boulder.
I dug around about half the perimeter with the hoe to figure out how big and deep it was, and like usual (tip of the iceberg scenario) it kept getting bigger... Eventually I had its depth pegged and due to the size I knew there was no way I was going to be able to lift it, so settled on making a ramp down to it opposite the side I exposed with the hoe, so that I would finally just have to flip it over on its side onto the ramp and then roll it out.
As it turned out, this boulder probably by all stretches of common sense was a bit more than what one should tackle with my machine. It was longer than my 7ft bucket, about 4-5ft wide and close to 3ft high. Thats a lot of cubic yards of solid rock... I am guessing it weighed as much if not more than my machine (~7600lb). While I was perfecting the "rolling" technique, to get it out the hole, I managed to spring the bucket off one side of the quick attach and of course the other side was jammed tight, so I had to drive back to the barn to find a big hammer to get the bucket released and then re-fitted properly. After that no further problems. It took over an hour to fill the hole and roll it across the field and I probably spend the previous hour and a half exposing the sides with the backhoe and digging the ramp.
My trail camera that was in the vicinity got the last 2 hours of the action on time lapse (1 frame every 15 seconds) and stores it as an AVI file, which I edited to make it run faster.
There is a low resolution version here And a higher res version here
I dug around about half the perimeter with the hoe to figure out how big and deep it was, and like usual (tip of the iceberg scenario) it kept getting bigger... Eventually I had its depth pegged and due to the size I knew there was no way I was going to be able to lift it, so settled on making a ramp down to it opposite the side I exposed with the hoe, so that I would finally just have to flip it over on its side onto the ramp and then roll it out.
As it turned out, this boulder probably by all stretches of common sense was a bit more than what one should tackle with my machine. It was longer than my 7ft bucket, about 4-5ft wide and close to 3ft high. Thats a lot of cubic yards of solid rock... I am guessing it weighed as much if not more than my machine (~7600lb). While I was perfecting the "rolling" technique, to get it out the hole, I managed to spring the bucket off one side of the quick attach and of course the other side was jammed tight, so I had to drive back to the barn to find a big hammer to get the bucket released and then re-fitted properly. After that no further problems. It took over an hour to fill the hole and roll it across the field and I probably spend the previous hour and a half exposing the sides with the backhoe and digging the ramp.
My trail camera that was in the vicinity got the last 2 hours of the action on time lapse (1 frame every 15 seconds) and stores it as an AVI file, which I edited to make it run faster.
There is a low resolution version here And a higher res version here
