Moving Mountains

How do you move a mountain? One shovel full at a time, or in my case, with one of these!



This one is a little bit bigger than the Tonka I used to have when I was 6 years old and it can move a whole lot more dirt. This is the first time I ever rented a dozier and man is it cool. I think I had more fun on the dozier than I did on the backhoe. This thing definitely has more power and can go just about anywhere. Working dirt with a dozier takes a lot of patience. You still have to move a lot of dirt one pass at a time. The red clay was so hard I could only cut about 3 inches at a time. I worked on this front hill for about 12 hours.

Before...



After.



Sandra went back to Michigan on Monday. I miss her already. I have been working all day for 3 days now. Today I had 7 loads of stone delivered. I was spreading it with the dozier when the fuel filter stopped up. Needless to say I lost about 3 hours of work this evening. Danny, the mechanic, is coming in the morning to replace the filter and get me running again. If it wasn't this, it would be something else! I have the machine until next Monday and I still have another hill to grade and also level the ground where I'm going to build the pole barn. Of course, I'm watching the weather forecast as I write this and it looks like I'll be working in the rain.

Here's the first load.





The driver wanted to dump half his load in a low spot on the right and I swear I thought he was going to tip his truck over. This picture doesn't show how bad this truck was leaning. As he was tipping sideways, the only thought going through my mind was "Bob, if this truck tips over you have to get this on video". I reached into my backpack and the regular camera was the first thing I grabbed. So all I got was a still shot. Fortunately, it did not tip over.



I almost forgot this little genius maneuver. Before Sandra left and I had to return the backhoe, I decided to use it to move my trusses from the start of the drive to where I'm going to build. Over three quarters of a mile. It took me 8 hours! I moved 19 trusses, 3 at a time. It was very stressfull. The backhoe is very unstable when you have the arm extended with a lot of weight on the end. Every bump or stump hole felt like the machine was going to tip over. My wife could not stand the stess after the first trip she spent the next 7 hours in the camper, only coming out to bring me something to drink or take a pic of me.