davvinciman, bladed many years that way, but as I get older it seems like it takes so long to recalibrate the bubble in the butt after a good fart.
davvinciman, bladed many years that way, but as I get older it seems like it takes so long to recalibrate the bubble in the butt after a good fart.
Yah, that chili bean grade can be a little tough to sell without a Cal Worthington cowboy hat on (he was a local car dealer). I'm not saying laser and crossfall doesn't have its uses, especially when those variable transitions come up in a roadway, but it seems like we have lost a lot of the other training that went with getting to that position in the first place. And that having a good eye and bubble meant something.Originally Posted by biggrader
Hey, I'm just living in the past a little bit.
I have been using a Topcon system 5 on a 12H with a sonic tracker for final trim work, saves a lot of time grade checking etc both in the final trim and doing subgrades, no problems with it so far. Cheers RDG.
I didn't mean to say that they don't work, just that you have to keep up on your machine's pins and brass to do the tighter tolerances they want on some projects. But it won't tell you how to get that dirt out of a cul de sac without tearing up your pads or how big of a windrow you should push up before it will choke that 623. Or even how close to your cut off you should come to keep the spillage from a 637 boiling over on to your "just finished" parkway when he is gutting the street for you. A GPS can tell you how far you are from the curbface but not tell you how to move the dirt to get down to the point so that it can make the grade for you. And blades that do that kind of duty often don't have a tight enough blade to make auto control worth it.
I find that having a few extra bodies around for looking at things with a different set of eyes pays off in more ways than just saving the money for not having to pay a guy when there is a little slack time. Because once a GPS or laser tracker can do that, they won't need me anyway. Or maybe I'll be in that office with them (but I doubt it).
we do roads that have sometime 3 controlled layers all with survey verification and compaction and depth tests, if the plan says 130mm thicks layer and it gets tested and its 110 we gota rip it up and go again...so having machine control from subgrade, then sub base, then 2 layer base, makes it easy to control. not so much for quality of work as many grader drivers know you dont rely on the machine guidance to do that, but just making sure of the corect layers and lines it is a handy piece of gear we have Trimble GCS900 on a 140m
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