CascadeScaper
Senior Member
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2005
- Messages
- 1,162
- Location
- Lynnwood, WA
- Occupation
- 2nd year Operating Engineer Apprentice
Hey everyone. First I'd like to say that this is a great site that I was referred to from Lawnsite and I've found plenty of good information here. I feel the need to introduce myself and give a little insight to where my posts are coming from. My aspirations for the future are to graduate from college with a business and landscape design degree. Right now I'm a senior in high school and have been running a lawn maintenance business for 6 years while my dad owns a full fledged landscaping/hardscaping business for about 3 years now. I'm hoping to one day take my dad's place and run the business, but I've always had the desire to get into larger scale excavation work, nothing like playing with big toys. Anyway, enough of my introduction and where I'm at, this is my "dilemma".
We have recieved the bid for a full landscape install on a property that is fairly limited on access and we are required to build a retaining wall using granite that was chipped from a very large rock on the property by a previous contractor. Some of the pieces left over are small enough to be used for the wall, yet others are quite large, up to 3,000 pounds. I realize that we could have used a smaller machine, such as a 307, but they are difficult to come by as they are always on rent and they aren't setup for a breaker. In lude to this, we have rented a Cat 312CL with a breaker that will be here tomorrow to break up some of the larger chunks and then swap for a bucket to dig the base, place the rock, then backfill behind the wall. The machine has a hyd. thumb and like I said they will send the breaker up with the unit. I've never done any work with a breaker, so I need a few tips (pun intended!). I know a few things, like keeping the tip perpendicular to the work, not to dry fire the breaker and not to use the tip if temperatures are below 45 without warming it up, but there has to be more than that. I can't see us using this breaker for more than an hours worth of work, but I don't want to break a tip and have to replace it, I know they're expensive. I will be running the machine myself, I'm a pretty competant operator, I've run equipment this size many times before just without the use of a breaker. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Sorry for my rambling thread, but I thought I'd put everything out there on the table. Thanks in advance!
We have recieved the bid for a full landscape install on a property that is fairly limited on access and we are required to build a retaining wall using granite that was chipped from a very large rock on the property by a previous contractor. Some of the pieces left over are small enough to be used for the wall, yet others are quite large, up to 3,000 pounds. I realize that we could have used a smaller machine, such as a 307, but they are difficult to come by as they are always on rent and they aren't setup for a breaker. In lude to this, we have rented a Cat 312CL with a breaker that will be here tomorrow to break up some of the larger chunks and then swap for a bucket to dig the base, place the rock, then backfill behind the wall. The machine has a hyd. thumb and like I said they will send the breaker up with the unit. I've never done any work with a breaker, so I need a few tips (pun intended!). I know a few things, like keeping the tip perpendicular to the work, not to dry fire the breaker and not to use the tip if temperatures are below 45 without warming it up, but there has to be more than that. I can't see us using this breaker for more than an hours worth of work, but I don't want to break a tip and have to replace it, I know they're expensive. I will be running the machine myself, I'm a pretty competant operator, I've run equipment this size many times before just without the use of a breaker. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Sorry for my rambling thread, but I thought I'd put everything out there on the table. Thanks in advance!