Some of my jobs...

[245dlc]

I haven't posted much on here for the last while. I've been operating heavy equipment for about 20 years now and bounced around Western Canada a bit in my earlier years. And in recent years had a stint in Southern Alberta which didn't work out well sadly. I'm working for a bit of a friend of mine for the past while I started working for him in 2014 when he was going through a pit of an expansion period. He started with one Hitachi ZX160LC modded to run a Promac 36" disc style brush cutter/mulcher so he could go after mulching jobs on pipeline and powerline right of ways as well drainage ditches and private work. He started to expand by buying a 2013 Kobelco SK210LC Mark 9 one of the first machines with DEF which is a nice machine to operate with a spacious cab unlike the Hitachi but the DEF was a headache until the warranty was off. And then he also leased a similar Kobelco but it had the Hino engine with a DPF/EGR system and was much more reliable. We were quite busy that summer working for a larger earthmoving contractor who had a number of jobs in our corner of Manitoba, as well some Conservation District related work, and pipeline related work. However by the time October rolled around and the weather started to cool down the jobs finished up and one particular job has been held up by a bunch of idiots in Ontario and Quebec (Energy East Pipeline) indefinitely. In 2015 I had moved my family to Southern Alberta as any work for me in Manitoba seemed to fade away and my friend had a hard enough time paying all his bills. He did manage to get some mulching work and even bought a Promac 52" flail mulcher for the 'good' Kobelco to run but the damage had been done he was forced to return the second Kobelco and had to reorganize his company. I was having my own difficulty finding any decent work in Southern Alberta and even worked on a couple shitty oil sands jobs. Late in the summer he called me up and said a whole bunch of work came in and he needed a guy to keep up I ran the sad, slow little Hitachi digging trenches for a utility installation crew. And he worked for the municipality on a ditching and culvert installation project. Eventually I finished with the trenching work and then started on cleaning 3 miles of ditches for the Conservation District in two different locations as it had turned out to be quite a wet summer and some farmers fields were literally under water. Expecting colder weather we cleaned up the machines (mostly the tracks) which was quite the job as we had been called for a large powerline mulching job in some rough country.

 

[245dlc]

The trenching work isn't complicated but does require some degree of finesse as the gas line has to be a minimum of 1 foot or 30cm away from the primary and secondary power lines and with the curved roads and cul de sacs I tend to widen the trench as the radius doesn't favour a long straight boom and stick. lol The trenches are only about 4 feet deep and usually the same width. The larger excavations are for pad mount transformers and pedestals for telephone/internet and fiberoptics depending on what's specced for the subdivision. The services are usually a much smaller squareish hole where the 1/4" gas line is rolled up into an open bottom wooden box with a tracer wire and locator beacon. The power cable for the building is also rolled up in a same kind of box along with a telephone or t.v. cable that are patched in to after the building is constructed.

 

[willie59]

That Kobelco looks like a 210-9, those are nice machines

 

[245dlc]

Our brush mulching job entailed about 19km of power line mulching through a Provincial Park and some very rocky terrain in some spots and swampy ground or muskeg in the lower parts. I jokingly called it swamp logging. We were hoping that the ground would freeze so we wouldn't have to worry too much about walking out in to the swampy area's but it didn't so I would go with the disc style brush cutter and zip off the trees at the bottom and lay them out so we could advance. And the utility company we were working for understanding of the need to 'float'. I spent a few days with the flail mulcher which we kept running close to the road as it wouldn't throw the shrapnel in all directions like the brushcutter and it worked better in the smaller diameter wood. The brushcutter however you can almost run like a hotsaw on a feller-buncher and drop trees too green or too large to be mulched. Both machines have detachable polycarbonate windshields as with traditional screens you can still get a high velocity stick between the bars! This I have seen myself.

 

[245dlc]

Where we started the job the bush was quite dense with quite a bit of dead fall as we worked our way down the hill we were able to mulch a little more in to the ground as there were fewer rocks and where there were rocks we were forced to 'hover mulch' which is never fun and your forced to maneuver around the boulders. The brush cutter is a neat tool it has bullet shaped carbide tipped teeth that can rotate in their holders, it has hardened steel side cutters which I use more than anything and smaller carbide tipped teeth on the top that can work like a wood chipper sucking in stick and wood and spitting out chips. The flails on the flail mulcher have carbide material on the inside part of the hammers and have a little more give if you touch a rock as they tend to swing away but it doesn't mulch the larger trees like the brush cutter.

 

[245dlc]

Working in to the boggy area's you have to keep your wits about you as don't have a bucket on so you can pull yourself out and if a soft area doesn't have trees stay out it's floating muskeg. Some of the softer area's I could lay down a mat of willows and poplar trees for some extra support but once I got in to the open swamp we would have to crawl out on to the road and walk the machines down to an area of good ground and start all over again.

 

[245dlc]

I spent most of the following winter ill with a stubborn respiratory infection and about midway through the summer my wife pulled rank and said we were moving back as nothing much was working in my favour, she had good employment but due to low oil prices it was difficult to find anything decent for me plus we were renting a house and getting screwed around by an over zealous Realtor. But my friend had work quite a bit actually and lots of it private meaning the company name and reputation had gotten around I guess and we had more utility work and municipal drainage and ditching work as well. I did manage to do some mulching with the flail for a local guy having drainage issues in a big clump of willows where it worked really well. We ditched this piece a couple months later.

 

[245dlc]

I had a job stripping topsoil for a granular fertilizer storage building it really could of been done with a dozer but they insisted on having us do it so I bailed and double bailed it all to one side. And also helped them get the coarse gravel base set up. They were going to use pit run to begin with as it was something like a 2 foot lift but I recommended geotextile with 6" minus crushed limestone rock as it compacts better and if it rains its less likely to turn to mush as this type of rock likes moisture and did require adding lots of water while compacting it. They eventually had a D5 come in to spread the crushed rock which was a lot faster than using an excavator to pad it in. lol

 

[245dlc]

The fertilizer company wanted to keep costs down so they rented the D5 and I trained their very busy maintenance man how to run it and after the crushed rock was placed a contractor came in and took over and did the rest of the prep work for the concrete.

 

[245dlc]

Last batch of photos for the night the D5 with my apprentice padding in crushed limestone and you can see the ad hoc water tanker it was equipped with a 3" 5h.p. pump and a length of hose. The dump trailer was also rented from a local gravel supplier and the limestone quarry was only a few miles away. To save some money all the building footprint go the limestone gravel the rest was done with pitrun and eventually 3/4" minus limestone.

 

[245dlc]

I had a small burial job for a local farmer one of his buildings had burnt down so he wanted the rubble buried as deep as possible to prevent the frost from heaving up the concrete foundation that was left behind. I dug three separate holes around 18 feet deep in the gooey Red River Gumbo we have out here it was interesting to see what was used a concrete reinforcement. lol It also didn't take long before my bucket was completely plugged that clay is often the most terrible scheisse to work in but at least I didn't have to do it for days on end like I have in the past. The leftover structure fell a part quite easily and didn't take much of a fight to tear it a part.

 

[245dlc]

That Kobelco looks like a 210-9, those are nice machines

It's a nice machine when things are running good, it gave a lot of problems with the DEF system till the warranty period ran out then we got a bypass for that. Last year I had started on a mulching job for a farmer's fence line and the electronic module that runs the auxiliary hydraulics crapped out, it took 3 weeks to get a new one. And recently the main CPU **** itself but only took a week to get a replacement at a cost of about $6,000.

 

[245dlc]

I spent a day and a half digging a basement and clearing some quite large granite rocks. After moving the rocks the digging was quite nice being mostly sand instead of the usual crappy gumbo clay and silt I find myself in. They also had me place most of the drain stone that they will pour their footings on.

 

[245dlc]

A local gravel supplier called us to reclaim a bunch of railroad ballast on a 1/4 mile section of abandoned rail line. All I did was scrape it up in to small piles so he could load it in to gravel trucks with his big Michigan wheel loader. He uses it to make 1" crush of which I hauled a bunch later for a culvert job and because nobody was available to load the tandem I got to run his huge loader, the bucket was wider than the tandem box was long! So the tailgate got a bit sandblasted in the process.

 

[245dlc]

I of course got pictures of that loader, he tried to tell me it was as big as a Cat 992 I said "yeah no, maybe a 988". Either way that made for a fun little job and it was all on the backroads so no worries about the DOT out there. lol

 

[245dlc]

Got some pictures of the skyline dredging machine he uses to bring gravel up from below the water table. Also a view from the operator's seat in that Michigan loader when I was loading the tandem.

 

[245dlc]

Something we don't do all that often unless its for our own jobs, but I spent a day hauling fill in the city for another contractor that was digging a basement addition, sure glad sometimes that this truck has an automatic tranny with all the stop lights between the dump site and the basement. The Case 160 sure was a nice machine and seemed to have a lot more power and speed than the Hitachi I normally run.

 

[245dlc]

We started running out of some steadier work not that we didn't have any so we took on a job with the Highways Department in the rolling and very pretty Western Manitoba near Riding Mountain National Park. We took a couple back roads hoping that it would be a little faster but the one was apparently being rebuilt as you can see in the pictures. It's very seldom we see a dozer in this Province bigger than a D8K so this D10 was a pleasant surprise.

 

[245dlc]

We took the brushcutter, the ditching bucket, and the 42" digging bucket as well the tandem and trailer as I was suppose to do a couple smaller jobs for the Highways Department after finishing the bigger one. The job entailed grubbing large tree stumps and mulched brush as well separating any logs so locals could cut them up for firewood. Originally the stumps and mulched up bits were going to be loaded in to roll off bins and hauled to a landfill for burning as some 'Safety Sally' decided that it wouldn't be safe to do.

 

[245dlc]

As I started the job I found myself digging out large Balsam Poplar tree stumps that sometimes had root balls that would go down 4 feet! The old girl handled them pretty well, but it was still a lot of strain on the 'Hitch' my boss always wants me to run in economy to save fuel but some of these stumps required quit a fight and some good lifting power. So I would pile up the easy stuff pull up the stumps and let them dry in the warm fall sun. There were a few spots where I was able to dig holes on this side of the road and bury some of the junk but I had to watch it as there were phone lines. Some locals said when and if I had some transportation we hauled the junk to a couple slough's or dried up marshes on their land and then covered them up with what bit of dirt that I did have available. Once I filled up the smaller hole using our tandem (hired in trucks hadn't been sorted yet). I started loading and hauling with my tandem to the bigger pond. I of course did have a load or two jam up in the tailgate so I had to track all the way there to sort it out. I found that the bottom of the pond had about two to three feet of really nice black topsoil so I ended up digging it down to clay and turned the thing in to a landfill preserving the topsoil for backfill and providing a nice close place to get rid of stumps and brush and eliminating have to haul stuff any further away. Also saving the Highways Department some money....something they know nothing about. I also had to try and manage some abandoned barbed wire I didn't have bolt cutters but a cordless angle grinder with a cutting wheel worked. I tried to use rocks as rip rap around the culverts