How well does it do when you don't want it to level. Like you have put the material to grade and need to compact it. Does it alter the grade?
Cheers KSSS ! ……bin awhile ….
As "jrtraderny" posted it's all in the angle you set the head at at, going forward or in reverse, KSSS if you can picture using a hand trowel to level fresh concrete, you can either push it or level it just by playing with the angle of the trowel …..
I have put a ton of hrs on mine now with no issues of any kind of failure or wear probs ….. I hardly ever build a road or driveway where I don't use this thing to polish up the job, we've even used it to compact around a new foundation backfill instead of having a couple of guys with jumping Jacks ….. again as posted it works best when the moisture content is bang on.
The job that I first purchased it for was our local VFD, we put in 1000 yds of 3" minus pitrun gravel ~2-1/2' thick in the drive and entrance to the New hall, compacted in ~12" lifts with a 6" top coat of 1" minus crushed road mulch ….. it has been three winters since that job and even in break-up (winters end when frost comes out of the ground) our heavy Fire Trucks don't even sink more that a half inch when tightly turning around, at its softest time.
A client of mine had a house burn to the ground a couple of yrs ago ….. after we cleaned up all of the old foundation (full below grade basement) we backfilled the hole with gooey wet clay muck as a base fill, thats all we had to use, it worked very well with minor build up on the bottom of the plate ….after we got up to grade I compacted the entire house site …. it has been 2 yrs since that job and it never sank an inch it tightened up like concrete, a little bit of top soil grass seed and its now an RV pad.
I also use it with my 312 Cat Exc. (built an adaptor from the exc Q/A to the skid mount plate that bolts on and off in 10 mins) for compacting over banks and burms or hard to reach places that the skid can't go, we also built an extra saddle that bolts on the bottom with a probe and to vibrate/drive fence posts into the probed hole, doing up to 40-50/hr in good flat terrain using the 312, a bit less/hr using the skid-steer because of lining up take a little longer ….. in the last couple of years it has probably done 15 miles of Range fence at a 16'-18' post spacing (i'll let the mathematicians figure out the number of posts that is ….LOL)
All in all it has worked out pretty good versatile attachment for our operation ……… Cheers !!!