For a long time I have debated buying a Woods BH6000 backhoe for my
BX2200 because of my doubts as to whether it could dig in the Duripan I have. Duripan is among the hardest of hardpans. The clay had hundreds of thousands of years for the flat particles to settle and stratify. This was followed by being covered with volcanic ash and/or obsidian, and then hundreds of thousands more years for silicon dioxide and silica sesquioxide to leach into the clay and cement it into a water impermeable lithified substance. When the clay topsoil is removed and the Duripan exposed, handtools like an adz (pointed end of what we call a pick-axe) simply bounce off of it, even if water has been sitting atop it in a depression for days.
This week, TBN member BX23Barry, who lives close to me, brought his
BX23 over for a test dig in some exposed pan on my property. The teeth on the 12" bucket would hang up and stop, but after a couple of seconds of building hydraulic pressure, the crystalline structure would slowly buckle and the bh was able to dig. I was astounded and ecstatic! It is currently our rainy season. The clay topsoil is supersaturated, and we found the very slightest trace of dampness in the pan tailings. Barry says that in our dry summer, he can dig, but it is very slow going, scratching through the Duripan an inch or so at a time.
There have been reports by other TBN members of a BX being able to dig in Caliche, a hardpan where clay is cemented by leaching of calcium carbonate, and TBN member Ultrarunner reports that his
BX23 digs successfully in the serpentine rock of the Oakland Hills.
Though plain clay compacted by vehicles can form a Fragipan, that material and Claypan (a dense and compacted, though not cemented, clay based subsoil), as well as just plain dry clay are not as hard as Hardpans like Duripan, Caliche, and Ironpan (clay cemented by iron oxide). Do you know which, of all these types of pan, you actually have? They do differ in degrees of hardness. In any case, however, a
B26 is a commercial grade tractor with far higher hydraulic pressure than a BX. If a BX will dig in these mineral cemented hardpans that are almost as hard as concrete, a
B26 will easily dig in the them as well. You should not have to worry about that at all.
I just don't know how much trouble your oak roots might be. If this did turn out to be a problem, Woods, Bobcat, and Bro-Tek make single shank ripper teeth that can be placed at the end of your bh arm (remove bucket and emplace ripper). These might work pretty well to rip through any bigger roots. I don't know who makes them, but on big commercial excavators, I have seen the bucket replaced with a blade that faces off against a flat surfaced thumb to make something like a Godzilla sized bolt cutter/cable shears. I have no idea whether something like that is available for utility sized tractor backhoes or not. Speaking of thumbs, once a stump is cut free, a standard thumb would be very valuable for grasping the stump and extracting it from the hole. Instead of pulling all the oak stumps, what about just grinding them off with a stump grinder?
I hope this has helped.
Finally, a big thank you to BX23Barry. Because he proved that the bh can dig in this pan, the CFO at my house approved the funding for a Woods BH6000. It is my both Christmas and birthday present for the next 20 years!!
