Off to the races. Getting fully setup to run 3D on my motorgrader.

smifwal said: Earthworks GO it is a good system and is cheaper than the 2D or 3D systems but you can't expand on it like you can with the 2D/3D for example you get 2D later you could add a laser catcher to get 3D you have to add some wiring and the receivers or to use with a total station you would add the prizm and a "all code" to communicate. So if you are planning on going further with technology you would have to sell the GO and start fresh Click to expand... Gotcha. We're running full auto GPS Earthworks on a D3 and 325.

CM what does "full auto" mean?

Well weeks are quickly passing by. Another 10 hours on the grader. Today we were prepping for another heavy duty pour. 8"s thick, calls for 1100 yards. Main site guys were high 3"s. This was on soil cement also. All turns have gravel ontop of the soil cement so it is some heavy duty roadway. Proof roll was set for 100. I did not get it close enough until 400 they were raising the eyebrows at me. I had to call in a p61 dozer to help I just could not cut the soil cement. My serrated blades had 1/2" rubbed off today absolutely ruined. I caught a buried metal plate, I believe someone else's belly pans that was mixed into the soil cement, It cold turkeyed stopped me, I was moving pretty fast almost threw me into the grader controls. Then the material that was stripped off was a lot. So a wheel loader and a 30 ton truck came and picked up who knows how many loads. Probably loaded for an hour. The dang dozer did not want to cut the soil cement so it was pass after pass after pass. With some areas over cutting and some not wanting to budge. Of course I have to follow him up to make sure it does not get cut to much. The first few hours of the morning were spent making an new as built model to load into the grader. They are hauling in off site fill and the quarrys trucks were driving to fast onto the site. They got warned 3 times. I have never seen this done before but they locked the entranced down and sent all the trucks back even loaded and shut down the hauling for the day. Needless to say it was a bit tense for a hour or so. I was happy that I was on the back side and not in the middle of that. My yields have been spot on. It is very stressful keeping up with a dozer cutting, a skid steer and a back hoe moving material. They other men don't have anything to go by other than gps on the dozer so they can strip too much and I am rushing to get it put back down to correct height. By the end of the day tablet battery and both robot batteries are gone. It takes like 4 hours to charge the robot battery so I was sweating bullets because everything was empty.

Georgia Iron said: CM what does "full auto" mean? Click to expand... Means when we get to the last couple of tenths the dozer will cut the final grade with no operator input. It has cut our finish grading time by at least 70%+. Most of the spec's for the jobs we do require final grade to be +/-.10'. We have had very good success with our GPS set up in hitting that tolerance. 325 hoe is the same. It will automatically cut a trench to grade, pull a slope or cut to grade. It's really nice when making a deep cut on big excavation job and being able to hit grade and still keep the trucks rolling with no grade checker. We can set offsets vertically for asphalt/concrete/finish surface depths in order to cut to subgrade and horizontal offsets so we can grade subgrade 2-3' behind the proposed curb line for example.

Georgia Iron said: By the end of the day tablet battery and both robot batteries are gone. It takes like 4 hours to charge the robot battery so I was sweating bullets because everything was empty. Click to expand... If by robot do you mean the total station? My guys got tired of charging batteries on our GPS base station so we got a small lawnmower battery and a small solar panel from china freight with the little charging mechanism. Works great and no more small battery charging. The base station will run all day on the mower battery even if it's cloudy.

cuttin edge said: View attachment 343315 Click to expand... This was a game changer for fine grading Our quarry gravel is like concrete between water and traffic on public roads. Trying to cut an inch with a regular cutting edge was almost impossible. I've probably fine graded 10 miles of road with them with no signs of wear. Initial purchas is expensive after that you just buy the teeth. They take mine off and only use them for highway work so they should last forever

CM1995 said: Means when we get to the last couple of tenths the dozer will cut the final grade with no operator input. It has cut our finish grading time by at least 70%+. Most of the spec's for the jobs we do require final grade to be +/-.10'. We have had very good success with our GPS set up in hitting that tolerance. 325 hoe is the same. It will automatically cut a trench to grade, pull a slope or cut to grade. It's really nice when making a deep cut on big excavation job and being able to hit grade and still keep the trucks rolling with no grade checker. We can set offsets vertically for asphalt/concrete/finish surface depths in order to cut to subgrade and horizontal offsets so we can grade subgrade 2-3' behind the proposed curb line for example. Click to expand... Gotcha, basically same principles as what I use. CM1995 said: If by robot do you mean the total station? My guys got tired of charging batteries on our GPS base station so we got a small lawnmower battery and a small solar panel from china freight with the little charging mechanism. Works great and no more small battery charging. The base station will run all day on the mower battery even if it's cloudy. Click to expand... Yes, total station. It spins 360s and tracks my machine so it can't have any wires going to it. Uses an expensive battery which i think is about $375.00 ea. Pops into the side of the station. In addition to all it, today the temperature got high enough that my station had a temperature warning accuracy. Maybe. 105 plus what ever was coming off the ground.

I started grading inside the hockey rink today. When I'm finished, they will lay down the lines for the chillers, then throw 9 inches of sand on top of that. They bought some type of machine control for the bobcat for that lift. Talking about bringing it down to try out on the lift I'm doing. Ill see if I can get some pics if they do

CM1995 said: If by robot do you mean the total station? My guys got tired of charging batteries on our GPS base station so we got a small lawnmower battery and a small solar panel from china freight with the little charging mechanism. Works great and no more small battery charging. The base station will run all day on the mower battery even if it's cloudy. Click to expand... We set our base up on our job trailer, and have a 12v automotive battery with solar panel charging. We can leave the base on 24/7 without issue in the summer, but we usually turn it off at the end of the day. Winter time we charge the 12v on the weekends.

cuttin edge said: This was a game changer for fine grading Our quarry gravel is like concrete between water and traffic on public roads. Trying to cut an inch with a regular cutting edge was almost impossible. I've probably fine graded 10 miles of road with them with no signs of wear. Initial purchas is expensive after that you just buy the teeth. They take mine off and only use them for highway work so they should last forever Click to expand... Those are nice and heavy duty. I don't believe I have enough weight to run them.

cuttin edge said: I started grading inside the hockey rink today. When I'm finished, they will lay down the lines for the chillers, then throw 9 inches of sand on top of that. They bought some type of machine control for the bobcat for that lift. Talking about bringing it down to try out on the lift I'm doing. Ill see if I can get some pics if they do Click to expand... Some of the big highway contractors around here are using tracked skidsteer mounted auto units for prep of center divider grade, and some other areas that are narrow or short.

@Georgia Iron , maybe @CM1995 will respond to this with his opinion, but we find that cut-to-finish works much better than trying to fill to finish. By that I mean that on automatics during a fill you will find that your material seems to disappear. It is more efficient in my experience to lay fill material out .2' high or more and then trim back to finish grade. The trick is to go back and forth from. +.2 to grade in a relatively short area so that you don't have to chase material at grade a long distance. It doesn't take long to realize what you lose to compaction.

Oxbow said: @Georgia Iron , maybe @CM1995 will respond to this with his opinion, but we find that cut-to-finish works much better than trying to fill to finish. By that I mean that on automatics during a fill you will find that your material seems to disappear. It is more efficient in my experience to lay fill material out .2' high or more and then trim back to finish grade. The trick is to go back and forth from. +.2 to grade in a relatively short area so that you don't have to chase material at grade a long distance. It doesn't take long to realize what you lose to compaction. Click to expand... It depends on how hard the material is and the size of the material. Loading and moving the same amount of material is the trick. Keeping the same size windrow with the material moving across the blade is best. Digging and cutting material is not my goal on a final pass. I would undercut everything and bring it back to grade. I can take a slight fill using fines with water and bring finish grade to within a 1%, typically they are ok with 5%. Good fines are expensive more so than gab. Running in a 100 trucks on a pour and keeping grade right takes effort and learning how much extra to leave. A poor form crew can cost you 10s of thousands, a poor screeed man can cost you 10s of thousands. Every quarter off is money. Lots of variables that need go be controlled. This is typical 3d grading, I must bring in grade to match each side. The right side is practically flat with a 1% side slope pitched towards the left curb. The curb side has highs and lows that vary about 7"s up and down. I match a 1% side slope bringing in the highs and lows to send water to the drains keeping the correct concrete thickness. From the building to the curb line is roughly 200 wide. It takes 3 pours in width and 2 in length. So 6 nights of pours per side roughly 1000 yards each pour. A concrete plant is running all night onsite to keep up with the pours each night. Pours are done in a work your way out fashion. So every day is the next nights work. Approximately 40 or 50 men is what it takes to do this working 24 hrs a day. Main site grading contractor support, pour crew, finish crew, form crew, sometimes a steel crew, concrete truck crew, cut crew, soil cement crew if we fail a proof roll, my close support crew, (water truck, backhoe operator, skid steer operator, roller operator, sometimes an additional back hoe operator or wheel loader operator, possibly dump truck drivers), engineering and testing (yesterday it also took an off road dump x2, a wheel loader operator, a dozer operator the attention of 2 additional surpervisors) and lastly me and a mere 12 hours to do the final preparation.

cuttin edge said: View attachment 343315 Click to expand...

Georgia Iron said: View attachment 343376 Click to expand... We use something like that for ice on roads

grading sand today. They put it on with the d4. Did a perfect job. But someone messed up the grade, and it's all 2 inches too high

Oxbow said: @Georgia Iron , maybe @CM1995 will respond to this with his opinion, but we find that cut-to-finish works much better than trying to fill to finish. By that I mean that on automatics during a fill you will find that your material seems to disappear. It is more efficient in my experience to lay fill material out .2' high or more and then trim back to finish grade. The trick is to go back and forth from. +.2 to grade in a relatively short area so that you don't have to chase material at grade a long distance. It doesn't take long to realize what you lose to compaction. Click to expand... Yes that's exactly how we do it with dirt. Over fill the final subgrade and cut to finish. This leaves a nice hard finish. We don't do a lot of finish gravel surfaces but the ones we have done our locally sourced DGB has to be .15' - .2' higher than finish in order to hit compacted grade.

This surface is to be finished within 10 mills. Like .39 of an inch. I have no machine control so it's going to be tedious with a 4 wheel grader. I wouldn't mind at all if i had my big volvo as it is more stable. They will lay the chill lines down then 9 more inches of sand Then they will try out the machine control on the bobcat

cuttin edge said: View attachment 343380 grading sand today. They put it on with the d4. Did a perfect job. But someone messed up the grade, and it's all 2 inches too high Click to expand... The Cat box blade set up we have with auto laser controls would slay that sand. We are able to get 1/2" tolerance easily with DGB - dense grade base which has particles up to 1.5". Once you figured out the compaction ratio of the sand it would be very easy to grade.

CM1995 said: The Cat box blade set up we have with auto laser controls would slay that sand. We are able to get 1/2" tolerance easily with DGB - dense grade base which has particles up to 1.5". Once you figured out the compaction ratio of the sand it would be very easy to grade. Click to expand... As long as they keep it wet it's not too bad, but as it dries out it gets unruly. It's the same ssnd we use for winter but no salt