Yair...a few issues here I reckon. First off the penetration thing...with a blade or with a scoop unless you’re working sand or loamy/ peaty top soil then to get maximum production it is necessary to rip.
(I just ducked for cover then)
Just because you can push it and get a “good boil going” without ripping doesn’t mean to say you’re being productive ...but you are burning fuel and cutting edge. Ripping time is seldom wasted. I have proved it building ring tanks...a ring tank is basically a thirty foot wall pushed up around a paddock, a small one is shown here.
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/46259159
I worked on these with a motley crew of hired in dozers and cross sections taken for payment soon sorted the men out from the boys. From my experience over many years...and the old Caterpillar how to films...you absolutely have to rip.
And that is just the start of it. Once you’ve got it ripped you have to know how to work your slots. Fair dinkum, I have seen fellers rip (and when I say rip I mean cross rip) and then back out over their block and start pushing from the back!!
Once you have it ripped you line up for your push and back out onto the ripped area about one tractor length. The blade will bury with very little effort and the objective is to get the tracks working on the interface between the rip and the next floor down. In other words you take out the full depth of the rip in one pass.
In practice you will find that as you come back for the next push you will bulge one bladefull out and then back up for another...some times in “ball bearing” country you can have two or three bladefulls moving in the slot. With this style of dozing you get less “ boiling” in front of the blade, in ideal conditions it will just sit there as if being carried in a scraper.
I could continue on down thread if anyone is genuinely interested...I have a very thick skin and I’m used to copping flack.
I was interested in Gregs comments. It seems he works his drawn scoops as if they were scrapers. I have always worked them different...and a tidy cut is not part of the equation.
Cheers