Working with a grader/blade.
Hi, Pullpan.
Working with graders is, as some have already said, a pretty individual thing with each operator having their own little quirks and preferences. However, a few basic rules do apply.
One: Work the material no more than you have to. If you have to mix it, do so as far as possible where it is going to be placed. Keep the moisture content up enough to hold all the fines in your material or you will finish up with a blade full of stones and nothing to bind them together. If the material is standing up a little on the blade as you work, the moisture content is probably not too bad.
Two: As others have said, work out from your low points toward your peaks. Work out where you plan to start and finish and try to stick with that plan. It is better to work along your high points and your low points if they are ridges and valleys than try to work across them.
Three: Graders work on the law of the lever. If one front wheel runs over a rock a foot in diameter, that foot is halved by the time it reaches the centre of the front axle and halved again by the time it reaches the middle of the blade, where the rise would be a whole 3". If you didn't touch the controls on that pass and made a second pass in exactly the same track, having taken the rock with you on the first pass, you'd be flat out finding where the blade rose on your second pass. (It would be almost a machine length back from where the rock was on the first pass, assuming that you made both passes in the same direction.)
Four: There are quite a lot of foremen/supervisors who actually can handle a blade, at least where I live DownUnder. They are worth listening to. Then there are a lot more who wish they could. You sometimes need to be a bit diplomatic with them but it's sometimes also not a bad idea if they are really hassling you to ask them to get up their butt up in the hot seat and show you how. Doesn't win you too many friends amongst the supervision and may get you 'transferred' but it does establish a point.
Five: Also as mentioned in earlier posts, slow and steady does it, at least until you get really good at it. Haste usually makes for stuff-ups. A good grade checker is worth their weight in gold and the quicker they are, the better they make you look, so a little training can be a good investment if needed.
Six: If the material is coming at you faster than you can final trim it, just go through and lay the lot first. Trim what you can, if you can, as you go but make sure you get your quantities right as you're laying your material 'cos you don't want to have to push it for miles later when you're trimming. If possible, keep the moisture up as you lay it, and after you've moved on, so that it's easier to keep it right when you do come back to trim it.
Seven: Good compaction makes trimming easier. I personally don't bother too much with keeping material on my blade when trimming. I'd rather have it well compacted and use a bit of weight on the blade to steady it all. You may even have to roll the blade forward a bit to cut more easily but you aren't then carrying big mobs of material for long distances, loosing fines out of it all the way.
If you are not being 'ridden' by a foreman/supervisor, try following your gut feelings as well as your eye. Your favourite butt can tell you a bit about the job too, if you learn to listen to it.
Hope this helps.
