Grading Help with a bulldozer

plumbstraight · Nov 20, 2011

if the trees are not bit enough to sell, use them for puncheon. Use a medium size excavator with a thumb and lie the trees in front of you as you build the road. They will give you the flotation you need and will be a base for the rock. Built many a mile in cedar swamps this way. Works good enough for logtrucks to drive on.

csharpe5097 · Dec 4, 2011

I am looking to buy a mini excavator with a thumb. Which one is the strongest.

Grandad4 · Dec 4, 2011

An RTV is comparatively light and you'll only go in there occasionally. It would sure save you a lot of work and expense if you could overlay some railroad ties and a layer of coarse material instead of bringing in heavy equipment. Still don't know how much road you need to build. That will determine if it's even practical to do a road in the first place.

csharpe5097 · Dec 4, 2011

It will be about a mile but its not all wet. What about a mini excavator. If so which one is strongest.

Grandad4 · Dec 4, 2011

About how much is wet? If it's more than, say, a few hundred feet, the cost and time involved in building it could overwhelm you. Seems to me you really need to get specific regarding the details here (not to us, necessarily, but definitely to yourself)... how many feet of "wet" ground? Seasonally wet, or all the time? To what depth? Source of water? Flowing or stagnant? Until you come up with a construction plan, all the equipment deliberations are kind of academic since you don't specifically know what the work will be.

Without knowing the details, all the helpful advice people might provide is simply guesswork. I can't comment one way or the other about a mini-ex in your situation, for example, because I have no clue how many yards of muck must be replaced with fill. If you are moving 100 yards or less, sure the mini would be great, but if it's really 1,000 yards, well you need something bigger, or it'll take years to get done.

rmk700 · Dec 4, 2011

csharpe5097 said:
It will be about a mile but its not all wet. What about a mini excavator. If so which one is strongest.

Do you really need to buy one? Why not just rent one to help get your road built?

Most top brand Mini Ex's will do you good.

Ford tractor · Dec 4, 2011

We go a mile of timber road to get to our land. Then a couple miles of more timber road on the land. It get's real expensive real fast.

A foot of dirt over wet clay is what I have and it's totally bottomless in the spring and summer if it's been raining. After freeze out, it would be easy to sink a dozer - and I mean out of sight under ground!

You will need to clear the trees and peel back the soil. The soil will decomp and settle leaving pot holes and other nasties. Then you will need to add solid fill at least 2x wider than the width of the machines and at least 1 foot above the high water level at the edges and 1.5ft at the center crown. As the base is clay and will be wet, you should put down the thick plastic material that helps spread out the load. If it's always wet there, you may need to put down the plastic.

If you don't understand water flow, you need to learn about it. A great solid road in the fall with poor drainage or that blocks drainage can become a sink hole or bottomless mire in the spring. i've proven that a couple times!:laughing: