Thought I'd give an update on my project and then finally post a few pictures for anyone interested. The project has gone pretty much to plan and I am still hoping on an end of May to mid-June completion. Since my initial posts I box bladed the yard a few times to try to loosen up/find some rocks. I also bent my FEL bucket a little trying to dig a big one out of the ground. Warning, it's very tempting to try to dig them out yourself but if it isn't budging either dig around it more or hire someone to come in. That being said, I was pretty amazed at how big a rock the
B7800 could "pop" right out of the ground.
After box blading I went to work with my 72" landscape rake to try to get the small and medium sized rocks collected and out of the way. This only worked ok. If I put it on an angle it would collect the rocks after a couple passes and leave them in a nice row but it would also collect a lot of the dirt as well. Anyway, I scooped the rock/dirt mixture out of there and made some more passes with both the box blade with teeth up and down and the rake. Everytime I thought I had all the rocks taken care of one pass with the box blade would reveal just as many more. Finally I decided I got enough out of the way and made a final pass with the rake to give everything a nice groomed look. Overall the box blade and rake combo worked really well for leveling/moving dirt and generally clearing everything away. It would have been nice, however, to have had a Harley rake for removing the rocks.
Once all that was done I called my excavator contractor and he came out with his big John Deere. He spent seven hours pulling out all of the boulders I had marked and tore apart a rock shelf that was in the middle of where the main lawn area is going to be. He cleared all of the big rock fragments out of there but left a mess of smaller rocks for me. I spent four or five hours that night box blading and raking that area.
Today (Saturday) I had topsoil brought in to fill in low areas and for a nice layer of soil for the grass area. What I was hoping would take about five truck loads (10 yards each) ended up using sixteen and I'm not done yet. I anticipate needing another five or six loads. At $125 per load this is can get expensive. Oh well, it's better to pay for what you need up front rather than cheap out and be unhappy with the long-term results. While the dirt was being delivered I was using the tractor to spread it out. The box blade and FEL combo worked magnificently for this. I was able to spread the entire load and rough grade it while he went for another. He only got ahead of me because I had to go get more deisel. This is where my tractor really shined and was totally in it's element. The only bad part of the day other than writing a check for $2000 was that it started to rain pretty hard. I worked for a couple more hours in the rain and then my tractor with turf tires started getting a mind of it's own. I decided it would be a good time to call it a day. If the rain stops I'll be back on it tomorrow.
That's all for now. I'll just post a few pictures if you're interested. I need to start on the next post though because I'm not sure on how to post a picture and I don't want to take a chance of losing this when trying to figure it out.