moving rock walls

dal929 · Jan 13, 2013

We have a few rock walls on our property that we'd like to remove to make the fields open and continuous. I was wondering what might have worked well for others that may have done this task before. I didn't want to just start trying to either scoop under sections of the wall with the bucket or pulling the walls apart with the grapple with out asking for ideas first. Thanks in advance for any suggestions/pics or ideas.

Kyle241 · Jan 13, 2013

Around our way it's an excavator with a root grapple/thumb and large dumptrucks. They have the power to get under some of those walls as many are partially buried over time. I have a similar issue albeit for a different reason. I wanted to move my rock walls to help make a trail through a low lying are of my property however I can't get an excavator there, let alone a dumptruck, without doing some major trail/road making.

dave1949 · Jan 13, 2013

If your rock walls are anything like mine which are partially buried as Kyle noted, scooping under them with the FEL bucket is a non-starter. The rocks are locked together. It is like trying to scoop a good sized mostly buried rock out of dirt with the FEL, it doesn't work too well and it's very hard on the equipment.

I would say pick the rocks off the wall from the top down with your grapple. Maybe put the smaller ones in small piles that are back-stopped by a mound of dirt so you can scoop them up with the FEL bucket. Unless you have a long ways to go, you could just transport the larger rocks in your grapple to their new location. If you do have far to go, then the dump truck may be necessary.

Thomas · Jan 13, 2013

I rented backhoe for the day when I remove my 150' stone wall,dig the rocks out also fill in smooth.

Haoleguy · Jan 13, 2013

I just finished removing a 1000' rock wall that was composed of large rocks pushed off an ag field to a section of desirable size wall making rocks. I had to move mine to widen a vineyard and at the same time make it easy to manage the invasive plants...without herbicides. In the end the best for me was to bury half the wall(lousy section) and move half(good wall making material). To move wall rocks I used a combination of backhoe to grubb them out and a heavy duty rock bucket(Houle HB-5) to pick them up and move them to another location. An excavator was used to bury the rocks that I did not want to keep. The excavator also provided a good way to pack in the soil around the buried rocks and smooth over the surface. In the end moving rocks is tedious and time consuming. The less you can carry at once and the farther you have to move them the longer it will take......Gary

Tags · Jan 13, 2013

If you have a backhoe for your machine and lots of time you could pull apart sections at a time and then bucket them to the new location. You could also rent or hire someone with an excavator a d work alongside them with your loader to move the rocks. It really depends on how far you need to move them and if you are planning to reuse them. Like someone stated, you could bury the less desireable ones and keep the manageable ones for reuse. When I've had to do this on a job we would get the dump truck close and load it with an excavator.

dal929 · Jan 13, 2013

Thanks for the input guys. I don't know how far down these rocks go as they all seem to be piled up from fields that were once planted. I do have a mini excavator that could certainly tear the walls apart allowing me to just scoop the scattered rocks with the bucket. Before I drag the mini 150 miles to this house from it's current location I'm going to try using the grapple to tear the walls down. I'm not going to drive into the walls but rather use the scooping motion of the grapple to see if I can push the wall apart. In other words..appraoch the rock pile with the grapple in the position seen in the first picture and then rertact the hydraulics to put the grapple in the position seen in the second picture. I don't think those hydraulic rams are strong enough to bend anything on that grapple and I would simply push the rocks off the pile. The next step would be to use the bucket to scoop up the mess and relocate.