Tree pushers.

Yair...as I posted on another thread it seems that few 'dozers in the U.S. are fitted with tree-pushers. Why would that be?

They are standard equipment on many general contracting tractors over here...in fact in a lot of areas without one you would'nt get a job. A farmer won't stand for digging around little eighteen inch trees when you're clearing a damsite.

They are much easier on the tractor too of course.

Any theories?

Cheers.

Never seen one until I just checked on youtube now. Have not seen one in NZ or during my travels in Alaska or Canada. How do you get them out of the way when not needed? Unhitch or fold up like an A frame on an operators tow-behind-ute? Anyway, I like the look of it, could use one on some of my tree/land clearing work.

Around here, it's pretty standard to take the trees out with an excavator, unless you are running a very big dozer on a large site. A D9 doesn't seem to need anything but a KG blade to take out about any tree.

Ran a Case 1150C back in the early 80s in western australia with a full tree arm sitting on top of a rake, that and a good set of rippers on the back made a very effective land clearing tool.

Never used a pusher, just a grubber. Most of it for mesquites. With mesquites, the tops of trees aren't what I'm after. I'm after the lowest lateral bud zone. Unless I get that up with the grubber, the tree will survive and resprout, making it even more difficult to eradicate. If I can keep the tree intact, it is easier to pull up and push over the part I'm after because now the weakest part of the tree is below the lateral bud zone.

The grubber does have a large pipe offset high and to the front, but it is only forward about a 1.5' or so. Ideally, it makes contact with the trunk of the tree about a little before the grubber makes contact with the roots. As the dozer pushes and lifts the roots, that pipe starts pushing the tree over and away from the dozer. Once the the dozer pulls and pushes enough the tree starts to lean, the weight of the tree above the roots will help pull them up and out, almost acting like its own pry bar and using the ground to leverage the roots free. Then it is simply a matter of ensuring the tree is completely pushed up, and using the blade on the grubber to ensure the roots are severed below the lateral bud zone.

A mesquite is very strong near the ground. A few feet above the ground, the wood is hard and fairly brittle on the old, large trees. A push bar will break the tree where it contacts the push bar, which means you no longer have the weight of the top of the tree to help leverage up the roots. Also, mesquite does not grow terribly tall, and it is very often multi-stemmed. A push bar would take a while to break off all the stems, but the tree is still very alive until the lateral bud zones are dug up and removed. The roots are softer and more flexible, so a ripper or a rake can often simply tear through them without removing them. That's why the blade on the grubber is important. It can down below all those bud zones, sever them from remaining roots, and help dig it up to the surface, where the hot Texas sun will quickly kill them.

With mesquite trees that are not mature, a push bar doesn't work because the trees just simply bend over until they are below the push bar. Once you run over the tree, it simply springs back into its original shape. If you lower the blade, the blade simply cuts the tree where it contacts the tree, which will always be too high to reach the bud zones. The bud zones sprout, and the trees grow back. Only angrier and with more stems.

We have them on our D6Ds . We use a square kelley bar from a drilling rig to build them out of. They stick out from the top of the blade about 4 feet and go all the way across the front. We build boxes out of one inch thisck plate on the top outside edges of our blades to put them into. We've never had a need to remove one, but if we did, we could just pull it out of the boxes. Weve pushed down some trees with one dozer that were so heavy we had to break them up to move them with 2 dozers. With out the push rack, the tree wouldn't have budged. Also, we put a piece of one inch plate sticking out on each side about 6 inches to pull trees out of fence rows and keep brush from skipping off the side of the rack.

Scrubpuller,
Not sure why US don't use tree spears. Maybe their trees aren't suitable to use a tree spear on. Maybe they have already cleared all the big timber that they are allowed to clear - like we're getting to in Australia. Hopefully my pics of our rake and spear are attached. This is on a D5N that is particularly efficient with the walkin rake(16') and the PAT blade. I have not done any damage to the angle system with the rake on this dozer or a D4H that I had the same style of system on. Between them I have probably done 4000hrs with a rake on a PAT blade. I do acknowledge that a straight blade would be a stronger system to attach a rake to but not quite as versatile when clearing undergrowth from standing forest.
Firetrack

Dunno about other place's in the world, but up here by the time we get to the area to be cleared, the loggers have already removed all the marketable timber. With the advent of their new logging methods, you almost have to look in a hole to see the stump.. if they come up with a way to cut em any shorter there wouldn't be any stump left. So here landclearing takes a heavy dozer to grub out big stump with no leverage point. I know alot of people think an excavator digs stumps and they do, but not in production mode.

A big dozer, followed by a traxcavator with a rake will stuff more crap in a pile in less time than any other method I know of. Grampa

Hear Hear!!!! Gramps. Agree with you all the way here. Lots of guys around here who are in the excavating business with an excavator and skid steer think they can do everytning from build four land interstate to pick their teeth with a track hoe.

When its time to grub I take out D7 or D8 depending on how much to grub, how big the stuff is and what it is. Elm being the worst with root balls being very large. Don't have a decent track loader here so rake goes on one of the dozers for clean up.

Re: tree pushers

Pretty much all contractors have pushers on their dozers around here, I just recently put an upper stop and lock to hold the pusher up vertically on a 6h with an angle tilt, used an old track link assembley and a 4140 pin, welded 1 half to the back of the pusher hinge and the other half to the back of the top of the blade, this allows the pusher to be held up vertically so its out of the way when using the full height of the blade for roading, i'll post some photos after i'm out there next.

Wow firetrack it shure looks like it is dry there do you need the triangle swamp pads very often?

Here in East TX we have soft ground so its pretty easy to dig around the tree some and pop it out.

Cowman,
I have the missfortune to operate in some of the makers worst country. It can be dust flying in one area and soup 50m away. It is called "coastal wallum". Normally I don't have the self cleaning LGP plates on the machine but when I do I tend to leave them on for awhile as it is a big job to change the plates back. But I now have two sets of chains and plates. One with 20" standard grousers and one with 30" LGP on. In softer ground the LGP plates sure do have some push power but in hard ground they are not so nice to operate - rough!. They'll shake the fillings out of your teeth!!. The LGP plates are hard on chains and I don't like to use them unless necessary or I'm too lazy to change them. Currently I have the LGP system on as we are doing roading and clearing tracks for a mineral exploration operation here. We prep for 3 drill rigs and then clean up after them. I have the D5N, JCB 3CX backhoe(absolutely usless in wet conditions), Hitachi 35U excavator and JD 328D skid steer on site. I have a set of McLaren over the tire protrack tracks for the JD328D so it can work in the wet. We are currently in our wet season. I have a 3.5tone trailer ball on fitted on the back of the rippers on the dozer(and rear of the JD328D) so I can tow the Bore Loggers and the drillers trailers around in the wet. The LGP plates are on for about 40% of the time. All the drill rigs are on tracks. We also have a 20' x 8' steel flatbottomsed sled on which we can put stuff(like portable toilets and portable sheds etc) and tow into extremely wet areas with the dozer. I have made it verrrry clear that if I'm towing the sled out and the portable toilet tips over it's staying in the bush, I'm not getting out to put it back on!
The D5N with the 16' rake is really efficient and can get over the ground. I also have a D7 with 20' rake and in some instances the D5N will get more done, and do a better job, in a day. All in all both pretty good units. I don't bring the D7 into the wallum country unless it has been dry for a while.
Firetrack

My father had dozers for many years up until the early 70s and always had a spear on one of the pair of tractors that he used for pulling scrub. As he preferred cable blades over hydraulic for earth work, at least one dozer would always have a double drum winch so he could use one side for the blade and the other side for the spear. The cable from the second side of the winch went out the top side of the winch, up and over two sheaves mounted on top of the canopy on the main 'roll bars' then down above the centre scrub bar, over a roller mounted on the radiator bar of the canopy and then attached to the cross bar of the spear. He had the spears set up to rest on the top of the blade and had fitted mounts on the top of the 'C' frame just forward of the trunnions which attached the frame to the dozer. The spear was pinned into these fittings so it could pivot independently of the blade. This way he could get the spear higher up for more leverage on big trees and also allowed the spear to be positioned almost vertically out of the way for earthworks etc. When pulling, if they encountered a big tree that the chain wouldn't pull over, the tractor with the spear would drop back and 'start' the tree so the chain could complete the task.

Unfortunately, the only photo I have of any of our dozers is one that does not show any part of the spear on that machine, but it does show that things don't always go well when pulling scrub.



Both dozers are 17A D7s which were pulling scrub downhill in steep country when an inexperienced operator on one machine ran up onto a stump which caused it to drop it's shoulder and roll. Blade and spear were raised at the time and if he had thought to drop them the incident may not have happened.

The photo does not give a true indication of the steepness of the hill but you can see some plowed flat ground at the top edge of the photo.

The inverted 7 had the spear on, and you can just see the chain attached to the drawbar.

The other 7 has a front mounted winch and mounted hydraulic rippers.

Scrub Puller; this is just over the hill from you in around 1970.

Gary

Sorry for this second post;m I'm trying to get the photo to display and I can not edit my original post. Hope this works!

My father had dozers for many years up until the early 70s and always had a spear on one of the pair of tractors that he used for pulling scrub. As he preferred cable blades over hydraulic for earth work, at least one dozer would always have a double drum winch so he could use one side for the blade and the other side for the spear. The cable from the second side of the winch went out the top side of the winch, up and over two sheaves mounted on top of the canopy on the main 'roll bars' then down above the centre scrub bar, over a roller mounted on the radiator bar of the canopy and then attached to the cross bar of the spear. He had the spears set up to rest on the top of the blade and had fitted mounts on the top of the 'C' frame just forward of the trunnions which attached the frame to the dozer. The spear was pinned into these fittings so it could pivot independently of the blade. This way he could get the spear higher up for more leverage on big trees and also allowed the spear to be positioned almost vertically out of the way for earthworks etc. When pulling, if they encountered a big tree that the chain wouldn't pull over, the tractor with the spear would drop back and 'start' the tree so the chain could complete the task.

Unfortunately, the only photo I have of any of our dozers is one that does not show any part of the spear on that machine, but it does show that things don't always go well when pulling scrub.

<a href="http://s453.photobucket.com/albums/qq252/OZRMXR/?action=view&amp;current=D717A-1.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i453.photobucket.com/albums/qq252/OZRMXR/D717A-1.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a>

Both dozers are 17A D7s which were pulling scrub downhill in steep country when an inexperienced operator on one machine ran up onto a stump which caused it to drop it's shoulder and roll. Blade and spear were raised at the time and if he had thought to drop them the incident may not have happened.

The photo does not give a true indication of the steepness of the hill but you can see some plowed flat ground at the top edge of the photo.

The inverted 7 had the spear on, and you can just see the chain attached to the drawbar.

The other 7 has a front mounted winch and mounted hydraulic rippers.

Scrub Puller; this is just over the hill from you in around 1970.

Gary

Here in East Texas, the push bars disapeared with the passing of the old smaller low horsepower dozers like the D7 3T and 17A. D7G's or larger are the medicine of choice now. You don't need a pushbar when you have the grunt to just push them over and out. What few have to be dug are not worth the hassle of a bar sticking out in front in the way.

wrwtexan
Plenty of trees left around here that a D9 won't rattle without a spear.
Away from my PC for a week now - going to Taipei
Firetrack

Yair...

Plenty of trees left around here that a D9 won't rattle without a spear.

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Yair firetrack I know the feeling, we have walked away and left yellowjackets standing even double tagging with these.....https://www.heavyequipmentforums.com/showthread.php?24431-Scrub-pulling-tractors

Cheers.

Most of the good farmland has been cleared long ago and what has come back is small enough to push or the small stuff is removed and they are left for cattle to graze around. Would love to see clearing on such a large scale. Maybe something in the range of a 10 or 475 size machine for the big ones...

firetrack said:

..... I have the D5N, JCB 3CX backhoe(absolutely usless in wet conditions), Hitachi 35U excavator and JD 328D skid steer on site. I have a set of McLaren over the tire protrack tracks for the JD328D so it can work in the wet. We are currently in our wet season.

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Hi Firetrack, have you been pleased with your over the tires tracks on your JD328D when working in the wet? Do you have all rubber tracks or just steel? Are the McLaren over the tire tracks any good or some other brands are better?