You do some nice work! And looks like you have some damn good ground guys and dedicated to you. Are you the only operator, truck driver? Your dedication is impressive to say the least. Wish we had dirt like that all over to work in. Finally had some the other day, was digging sanitary laterals off the main line. All I kept thinking about was keeping my walls like your pictures. I love a good clean cut. We aren't under a lot of pressure on this job, so I took some extra time to really try to make stuff nice, even though we backfilled it right away. Just wanted the practice.
Thank you. My guys are great, I just hope I don't burn them out and down.
Yes, I am the only one right now. It's all me and the laborers and I'm killing myself. I'm looking for a guy that can help me out and do jobs too. Might be awhile before I can find a class A driver who can operate and is what I'm looking for.
It's great that you have the passion too...pretty cool thinking about the pictures while at work. I too think about the work pics I see here a lot, and I should comment more on them actually showing my appreciation.
Shear cutting has always been my favorite thing to do. Especially if you don't have to be an exact 6" off the form board like these pools. If you can just go till your cut gets perfect without worry of being a few inches too much or too little, then it's fun to see how perfect you can get it. Like digging a basement, you can shear cut like magic, because you don't have an exact cut to be at. Just an approx. 3' or 4' over dig. Doing pools you absolutely cannot over cut anywhere, it has to be right there on the line. I used to shear cut apartments on a track loader. The two story in the front and three story in the back style. I would do shear cuts for the foundation walls that could easily be 200' long or even 300' and up to 15' high. It was quite a technique to do and keep the tracks level as dirt falls down and makes the loader camber away from the shear cut. The grade foreman really had that job upheld high.. He was doubting any newcomer could shear cut the way they had done it for decades. Well, I stayed late one day and cut a shear cut by myself on the open cab 953B and did it right. It was all that 53 could do to reach up 13' to 15' high and make the shear cut. These cuts were huge, the company would leave the upper pad 4' higher for back fill dirt. Engineers would stake the building and we'd offset the stakes for the shear cut. When finished It was a couple feet over the top of the D9L when you were looking at it from the bottom, and if it wasn't, somebody did something wrong. Very tricky. The crew would build the upper pad to grade and we'd all track in the slope and then shear cut out for the wall going off the offset stakes. When shear cutting the cut dirt would fall under one track and you have to keep the machine at zero camber and the cut dirt would raise the 953 high enough to achieve a cut that it couldn't normally reach. You then have to cut that dirt out also. So, the next day on the headsets, one of the guys said " Hey, Brian (the foreman's name) did you see that shear cut Brian made(my name too).".........nothing but radio silence. I knew I did it right, he just couldn't acknowledge it at the time. The guy on the 973 quit shortly after that, and then I had the 973 doing all the finish work for the whole crew. It was my glory moment and job. Short lived though, one day I went to lunch and instead of returning to the crew I just drove home. Regretted that move months later and called the owner, and he told me he had big plans for me , but he didn't put up with people who walk off the job.... Fair, I said and I carried on with my life. I was only about 23 yrs. old or so. By the way we would have to go back and clip the top of the shear cut for OSHA standards and put up orange safety fence to avoid somebody or something going off a 14' to 15' drop. Oh, and a lot of the apartments had step downs every two units to meet elevations, which made it even trickier.
I too have run laterals like you on 30 ton hoes working with 650's and 450's on the main line. It was scary watching deep cuts collapse after the double stacked trench boxes get dragged up the line. Looking back, I've really done my time and enjoyed it all, I and wouldn't trade it for nothing.