End of the story
Well, job's done. I got to 2.5m. To go deeper I'd have had to adopt Jeembawb's suggestion and bring in the back hoe to remove spoil or severely escalate the scale of operations. The system of working a slot and pushing the spoil up a ramp at either end worked well, however this depended on gradually lowering the ramps as I progressed downwards. Of course, the inevitable happened and I hit a couple of big floaters on one of my ramps. Might of been just one, hard to tell until you engage fully and I wasn't interested in going there. This meant one ramp got rapidly steeper and I discovered that, since I rebuilt the fuel pump, my dozer now has the grunt to wind the dozer backwards when the tracks don't go forwards. Won't do it on the flat but when the radiator is pointing skywards.....
I've never heard of anyone flipping a dozer over backwards but there was a moment there when I thought I might be heading down that path. Forward motion ceased, radiator cap still heading upwards. Actually on the angle she was on, more like radiator cap heading backwards. The ripper was fully up but was embedded in the ground!
Anyway this told me that I was at the limit for that ramp. I did one more slice in the opposite direction and called it quits. I took a photo near the end. I'll see if I can add it to this post. It's a big hole, but not excessive. Mind you, I needed some fill material for another area and this was really good stuff, so I stole three truck loads ( about 20 tons) and it didn't make much of a dent in the big heap I dug out. Surprising just how much stuff you can push up in a few hours with a small dozer.
Well, job's done. I got to 2.5m. To go deeper I'd have had to adopt Jeembawb's suggestion and bring in the back hoe to remove spoil or severely escalate the scale of operations. The system of working a slot and pushing the spoil up a ramp at either end worked well, however this depended on gradually lowering the ramps as I progressed downwards. Of course, the inevitable happened and I hit a couple of big floaters on one of my ramps. Might of been just one, hard to tell until you engage fully and I wasn't interested in going there. This meant one ramp got rapidly steeper and I discovered that, since I rebuilt the fuel pump, my dozer now has the grunt to wind the dozer backwards when the tracks don't go forwards. Won't do it on the flat but when the radiator is pointing skywards.....
I've never heard of anyone flipping a dozer over backwards but there was a moment there when I thought I might be heading down that path. Forward motion ceased, radiator cap still heading upwards. Actually on the angle she was on, more like radiator cap heading backwards. The ripper was fully up but was embedded in the ground!
Anyway this told me that I was at the limit for that ramp. I did one more slice in the opposite direction and called it quits. I took a photo near the end. I'll see if I can add it to this post. It's a big hole, but not excessive. Mind you, I needed some fill material for another area and this was really good stuff, so I stole three truck loads ( about 20 tons) and it didn't make much of a dent in the big heap I dug out. Surprising just how much stuff you can push up in a few hours with a small dozer.