Clearing Trees to Extend Ridiculously Long Driveway! (Again!!!)

[Music] what's up guys welcome back to diesel creek if you're new around here my name's matt we are currently out here at my farm today or what's going to be my farm i always caught my farm but it's actually just a piece of land right now but it was my grandma's farm so anyway back story we are standing almost at the end of my super long driveway here i'm going to have to re-measure when we're done but it's probably going to end up being a little over a quarter mile from the road to my ship and container shop just over here but as some of you guys know it's been quite a while since i've worked on the driveway i just kind of clear and do sections of it at a time when i have the time and finances to do so but i want to get started on finishing it today or at least finished for a good while this road needs to continue down i don't know if you guys can see there's some x's on some trees down there those trees gotta go we can make a straight shot down there right at the end of this is where i want to build my house someday and then it's gonna bear to the right down here run along this ridge and run in front of the ship and container shop over here and that way i will have a nice rock to drive on rather than a mud hole because i'd like to work on things in the shipping container shop but it's pretty good little walk to get from my truck clear over the shop you know especially when you're carrying tools and everything back and forth and it gets pretty muddy through there so it'd be a heck of a lot easier and i would uh definitely be a little more encouraged to come out here and work on stuff if i could just drive all the way right up to the building call me lazy but that's the thing but anyway the fact is it's a nice day today it's a little chilly but we're gonna get the excavator fired up we're gonna take out those trees and start uh prepping to get the rest of this driveway put down let's go been several weeks since the old komatsu has been fired up it's in the low 20s today it's pretty chilly and this thing doesn't have any functioning grid heater or glow plugs so yep hopefully we can get her started so close all right well the old girl doesn't want to start on her own a company sent me this uh jump start pack the other day well not the other day heck i've had it for a couple months now i've only used it one time on like a little lawn tractor and it worked there so we'll see what it does for something like this this is probably a bit more than it's really made for but i've always been skeptical of these things i really don't see how it's supposed to work with such little cables and stuff you know but there's people that understand pixie wrangling a lot better than i do that could explain it because i know that some of them are pretty nice i will i will give them these guys even without saying if it works or not the cable clamps on here are a lot better than i would have expected they look like you know they didn't look like they would be that great but they actually feel really good in the hand it's got a little green light so i'm gonna go ahead and hit the key see what happens [Music] so well that seemed like it worked pretty good in all fairness i don't think this thing really needed much more extra oomph to get that little bit to fire uh you know if the battery was a lot lower than it was i don't know that this would have done it but it did do it you know if you if you just left your headlights on the parking lot or something probably work you know it fits in your glove box it is pretty handy so yeah anyway thing seems decent you know i've seen some really chintzy ones that i didn't really like the looks of but i don't know i've been using it as a power pack a lot for charging up my camera gear and other stuff while i'm out here in the woods it's got some usb ports on it too so you can use it as a power bank links in the description if you're interested all right let's go knock some trees over [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so i got my dirty old hoe up here ready to start yanking some of these trees out now see like that little cherry right here it's a fairly small tree i should be able to manage to just shove that straight back that way into that clearing uh cherries are pretty easy to get out the roots aren't really that deep now i'm not gonna touch it but say this elm tree right here that about the same size as that cherry i'd have to dig a big old pit around that thing before this machine would be able to push it over elm trees are rooted in really good luckily i don't have two too many of those out here the next we're going to be taking down that silver maple as much as i hate to i'm going to save that one that looks like a good tree to throw at the sawmill if i ever get one or pay the neighbor to saw it a couple little scraggly ones down through here and then we got a big dead cherry down at the end there and some other little ones but we'll get that when we get there so even that little cherry there i probably can't just shove it straight over i mean i probably will try but what i usually end up doing is just popping the roots from both left and right sides of the tree and then shoving it straight back with the bucket the nice thing about an excavator versus pushing trees over the bulldozer you know a bulldozer the blade only goes up so high you don't have that much liv you don't have that much leverage but the excavator you can take the bucket put it way up top there and use the whole tree as your lever and shove it right over so always like to get the stumps out that way you don't have to worry about them rotting down the line and causing issues so let's get going so so [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] okay this next silver maple here is quite a bit bigger it's probably about a 24 inch tree at least down at the bottom there uh same principle applies just dig around it but uh you know when you get these big boys you got to kind of pay attention you're not undermining it too far and it could actually come over on you while you're still trying to dig it out so just gonna keep checking it keep your eyes on it so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] all right i told you she was a big girl here's a little size comparison for you i'm six foot two i got an eight foot reach a little over nine foot a tree stump here or at least nine foot of root ball not a tree stump all right now that we got this big old tree on the ground the first thing we're going to do i'm going to take the hose start scratching all the dirt off of that root ball because we're going to need to fill that hole in and i'll also be throwing out all this little root junk that's laying down in here because you really don't want to backfill with that kind of material it'll still rot and sink like there was a stump there not as bad obviously but you know once i get as much dirt off of that as i can i'll grab the chainsaw whack that stump off so i can manage it because this excavator can't pick up that whole tree plus that root ball so i'll have to chop that off so i can get it out of the way and backfill the whole track it in real good and move on to the next tree [Music] ah [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] there we um [Music] [Music] yes [Music] hmm [Music] me [Music] all right that was a textbook example of how hard these elm trees are to get out but it's also a really good illustration of why they're so hard to get out this is maybe so a six inch tree but look at the root system that this thing had on it it was so there's the dirt line right about there it had all this big stubs sticking down in the ground all these little tap roots anchoring downward and outward really make these things a bear to get out this big silver maple we just took down though the root ball was really wide it really wasn't that deep that root ball probably not even quite as thick as this little teeny root was that's why i hate digging out elms we're going to attack this little patch here next i got three scraggly little trees here behind me a couple maples and i don't even know what that third one is but this big dead cherry that one's going to wait till last because if you watch the driveway series that is my target tree and until i have this straight stretch completely done up to this tree i'm gonna leave that so i got something to aim at when i'm scraping and laying my fabric and putting my rock down on the driveway [Music] [Music] [Music] here's the dilemma i'm facing now guys as you can see the driveway comes all the way down here nice and straight more standing just off to the side of it that tree there is the center line for the whole thing that should be the end of the straight section and it should start to turn right at that tree i'm going to start breaking it over towards the excavator there and my house is going to be just basically on the other side of the excavator eventually now there's this beautiful big oak tree right here that i would love to be able to keep and i kind of thought about making a roundabout around that tree you know removing a couple of these over here making a roundabout and that way when i come in here with big trailers and stuff i could actually just cut to the right of that tree and not have to worry about swinging and catching that thing you know because if you're coming out this way and trying to swing around it it would be difficult with a long trailer uh the other part of me thought maybe just stop the driveway just short of this tree a little bit and then break it and bend it right before this big oak tree um but then you end up taking out several of these cherries over here so not really sure six of one half dozen the other i'm a big tree hugger i guess you could say as close to a construction worker tree hugger as there is i like to save all these trees i don't want to cut any more than i have to to make my driveway nice you know i mean i could have weaved it through all the trees but that would have been a nightmare to maintain cost a lot more in stone and everything a straight shot should require the least amount of clearing and rock so that's why i did what i did here also i really like the idea that i can sit on the front of my house and i should be able to see all the way down this driveway so i got my route planned finally i decided on that so we got maybe three maybe four trees to take down we'll get those knocked down and then i'll start cleaning up all the tops cutting off the stumps and getting rid of everything and then maybe we can break out the bulldozer and start cutting the top soil [Music] off [Music] good [Music] [Music] um [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so if you haven't been able to tell in this video i'm kind of going a little more in depth than normal kind of trying to explain my thought process on what i'm doing here so i was just getting ready to take this tree out and i was going to bring it this direction towards the camera and i started looking at it that right there with the y at the top that's the dead tree that is my target tree at the end of the end of the driveway now that tree is super dead super brittle and the top on it is leaning both directions so there's really no safe direction to push it from uh without the risk of something coming back and hitting the machine or if i cut it down with saw you know the same thing applies it's almost a little safer to do with a saw because there's no big jars to the tree before it's already falling but what i think i'm going to try to do is i'm going to use this tree and send it that direction and try and bust off that top over here with it and that way i'll have a safe side to try to push from or at least a little more safe so yeah hopefully we'll get two birds stoned at once here [Music] [Music] [Music] well uh that didn't work in fact it was nearly a really close call again with another tree top pushing trees over in the winter time is a little more dangerous than in the summertime because it's harder to tell if a tree's really alive or dead that one i pushed over just now i could tell it had a couple bad spots in it but it really looked like it was still in a live tree it didn't really look like it was dead uh and it very little resistance against this other tree and immediately broke in half and came back nearly missed the machine i mean the the i just kind of eyeballed as it came down hoping i could swing you know enough to get it out of the way luckily nothing happened to the machine everything's good let's check it out so there you go you can see how rotten and hollow that log was and it really didn't look that bad from the ground down here it looked you know maybe not healthy but it wasn't rotten from the ground it was definitely still alive i can see there's green on some of these smaller limbs but it it wasn't long for the world i can tell you that and this side is the limb that busted off and nearly hit the machine here it was pretty close one of those things that makes you pucker for a second but not too bad all right let's get this root ball cleaned up and uh get this whole mess out of here [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay i got our route laid out for the road here i uh pulled a string line off this tree that i don't want to remove i don't know if you guys can see the string real well so that's our target tree at the end of the long stretch of the driveway so you're going to come down this way and you'll go right through that tree eventually to go straight to the house but what we're going to work on first is come right up to that tree and swing right down through here and then run along this route straight that way i ran this string line straight to where the left side of the garage door will be on the big shop when i built it this way i'm not laying a road down that is indirect and in which way i would be wasting gravel in time essentially so i should be able to just strip this top soil off of here and start laying some stone all right we're going to use my bulldozer to strip the top soil off it has been a while since i've used this thing we'll make sure we check the fluids and everything i've been avoiding using it because the hydraulic cylinders a couple of them up front here need to be rebuilt they leak a little bit of oil but not too bad we can still use it to make quick work of that driveway all right the fluids look good i'll go ahead and get this thing fired up and then i'm just going to back it outside let it warm up while i give it a good greasing [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] obviously this is uh the spot i left off stripping top soil and putting down the rock and fabric in the summertime i've explained in previous videos this isn't just plastic i know a lot of you guys that aren't in the industry i think that i'm just putting plastic sheeting down this is not the same stuff you put underneath your garden and keep the leaves from coming this is a purpose-made road fabric called soil stabilization fabric or geofabric basically what it does is keep the mud from coming up through into your stone and contaminating your stove anyways the weather keeps threatening to ruin the party here i don't want to get too much opened up because it could be a little while before i'm able to actually put the rock on this so i'm going to go ahead and strip the top soil all the way up to the target tree and then call that good it doesn't take very long to do this with the dozer so let's get to it um [Music] [Laughter] hmm [Applause] um so so uh hmm [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right got the topsoil all stripped off i ended up having to cut a little bit of clay out over here i didn't realize there was kind of a little bit of a hump in here so took most of that out it's actually pretty darn hard and we also i'm probably just making excuses at this point but we're just coming out of a good freeze period here and parts of the ground seem to be frozen still and parts of the ground are thawed so like i was cutting along through here and there was places that all of a sudden the blade would just start riding up over top of the ground rather than cutting it and then all of a sudden you'd start diving and getting sucked in so took a few passes over in a few different directions trying to keep her smoothed out it's uh it's not a perfect plane but it's not a washboard either so good enough for a farm road you know if we were building a super highway it'd be a little different so like i said guys it might take me you know several days or even a week or so before i can actually get the time and the weather to cooperate for me to lay out the rest of my fabric and get my rock down to about here and then we're going to make the turn and start swooping over towards the shipping container shop so i don't want to strip out all that topsoil over there and make a you know once you strip the topsoil off if it gets wet it becomes a mud hole and uh you'll be using more rock than you need to so i'm gonna leave that topsoil on there for now and in the next video we're gonna be putting our fabric down we're gonna be dumping rock we're gonna be spreading rock and hopefully at the same time stripping the rest of this topsoil off and getting all that rock put on there i think about two good days of hauling i should be able to get the whole thing rocked over to the building it's pretty good little ways so anyways guys that's the end of this video i'm about out of time for today if you like the video don't forget to hit the old thumbs up button it really helps the channel out and uh if you like heavy equipment and playing in the dirt don't forget hit subscribe button so i can see you on the next video thanks for watching guys later [Music] [Applause] so [Music] you

Channel: Diesel Creek

Views: 387,787

Rating: 4.9503779 out of 5

Keywords: farmstead, homestead, homesteading, construction, heavy equipment, dump truck, trucking, building, farm, woods, small business, ranch, international, kenworth, peterbilt, ford, checy, dodge, bobcat, jcb, deere, takeuchi, case, wacker, yanmar, komatsu, kubota, cat, caterpillar, skid, steer, loader, excavator, dozer, bulldozer, hitachi, backhoe, grader, grading, millings, tailgating, stone, rock, doosan, volvo, kobelco, farming, pennsylvania, trees, clearing, pc75, d41a, 6-way, blade, dirt, field, road, driveway, building.

Id: GprljQyzzcs

Length: 43min 54sec (2634 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021