I just picked up a job to build the approaches (ramps) to a new bridge. It's about 900 feet on one end and about 1800 feet on the other end. It will be a two lane road, and it looks like it will take about 50,000 yards of fill material hauled in and spread to plan specs. Wider at the bottom then coming up in 8 inch lifts to the main lanes and shoulder base course. It will then call for spreading and compacting the base gravel to within 1/2 inch of plans to get it ready for the paving contractor.
A mentor has advised me to rent a D6K and a GPS system to do this job. He said I can help spread with my JD700H, but let the automated D6K do the bulk of the work. I have worked this out with the Caterpillar rental people and they will rent me the equipment and build the model for me. The rental price is well within my budget for the job.
The only knot that I have in my stomach is that neither I nor my guys have experience doing this with the GPS. We have a laser system, but that is really not much help on the portions of this job that have the superelevation and things like that.
What will I need to do to get up to speed quickly once we start hauling material? Is there some training available for my finish dozer operator, or do I just let him figure it out on his own? He can finish grade by eye and with stakes about as good as anybody, and he is the right age (early 30s) to catch on quickly to new methods. But I hate to be paying rent on an expensive system and have trucks stacked up waiting on someone to learn how to spread via GPS machine control. I also hate to just pile 800 yards a day in there on him, spread it so it looks about right, and then have to re-do it to proper grade after hours.
Any pointers?