The project at hand right now
is to put in a new driveway. So I just bought a new to me excavator. So this is a 2014, with 4000 hours
I just paid 71K for. It's got a hydraulic main pin thumb,
a hydraulic pin grabber. It's plumbed to take accessories
like a hammer or a tilt bucket. And the existing driveway
here is kind of steep. And this is actually the second attempt
at this driveway. If we walk down the road,
you can see the first driveway that they abandoned originally came in right here Then it went straight up
and essentially ended up at the same top part, but just,
you know, did it in way less distance. So it was a much steeper drive. Here's the gravel from it. They just kind of
filled over top of it with this one. So old one, current one. And where essentially going to put a new one
in coming off the road in the same spot. But we are going
the complete other direction. So we marked it out with some ribbons
to the woods here. But we're cutting in on the side of this
bank, right just up the side of the hill. And it looks like it's going to be less
steep. This driveway is going to stay here. So he's going to have a circle driveway. Now, once this is done and also this one
has a turn in it right on the Hill. So the next one is going to have
a turn, too. But it's going to happen at the top
where it's flat. Let's do a drop of measuring to see what the grade of the hill is going to end
up as and compare it to this one Do you want to start here? No, at the bottom,
I'm just saying like we should be measuring to about right
where the driveway starts to turn. We're taking off right there. The drones got the two numbers zeroed out. It's got the distance traveled
horizontally and vertically. Once we fly up to this point
here, we're going to have okay, we flew this far horizontal
and this far vertical. Essentially, we have the formula for a
right angle triangle and we'll be able to calculate this
the grade of the hill because we know how far we went this way, right angle
and we know how far we went this way. over there,
we're going to have a longer number, same height, essentially, and we're going
to have a flatter triangle Go for it Start going up the driveway get to the turn and measure from there, Land it now 53 foot height, 206 foot distance. Okay. Now we are measuring the new one. We're just walking up there.
So we can see where to land. So we essentially marked out
the new driveway We've got a couple of little flags you guys probably can't see,
but it's going to go straight into here. Hopefully we don't hit
any un-digable Bedrock, but I like that we're seeing stuff like this is good. All this material here,
we're going to pull all this stuff? This is good
that we're seeing all this rock because that gives me some material
to work with. So we're coming straight through here
and we're on a pretty steep hill this way But the good thing is what we're measuring
now is we're not much higher for the amount of distance
we've traveled this way. But I mean, look where we are, in relation to where we started from. we're not much higher. This is going to be a pretty level
driveway. And here we are
at the top where it flattens out and essentially it's
going to go right through there. We want to get to here with the drones This is going to be
really tricky to land here we can get through that hole
right there, probably Your number zeroed out
and you're recording? It doesnt matter where you go as long as you end up here now just come come down
through this hole hopefully it'll let me through come down 46 height 386. Okay so yeah I mean that's good because we're at 212,
you can already see our height. is pretty much the same thing. The old hill did it in 212 feet,
the new one did it in 387 feet. That tells you how much less steep Its almost double. That's justifies
the project.
Using the drones like that was just an interesting way
to measure what we're doing right now It's crazy, I didn't think was going to be double Yeah that's like unbelievable. Oh yeah, that is good rock Andrew, how many pounds do you think it is? I'll get it. All right, so I finish roughing this in with
the excavator, that's drivable technically. Let me just hit it with the skid steer quick to get a little smoother. All right. So I just finished roughing it
in this road, so that looks pretty good. First one to drive up it The steepest part of it is
less steep than the entire old driveway. Plus,
it kind of flattens out in a few spots. More could be done to this. In the future. Putting gravel down would be nice. Maybe hammer some on the sides, but it's roughed in
and looking pretty good for this stage. So the new excavator that, worked out
great, very happy with that. The zero tail swinging is definitely nice because a lot of the other machines, if
you're next to like that cliff or a tree and you go to swing,
you're hitting the back door on it. This one, the counterweight
never swings out past the tracks. So it's like you're
never looking behind you the whole time. So this should be in
plenty of videos in the future. Definitely looking forward to
using this more. Cody, what do you think? What do you think buddy? You too Blue. and you guys are the runaway dogs. We're just looking for them for an hour. Where did you guys go, exploring? So he's got a nice little burn pile here. I got it stacked pretty tightly,
so that should burn pretty easy. That's the homeowner's TL8 there. He replaced the bobcat he had before
that was constantly breaking. That's a pretty nice machine right there. So that was good to just smooth
everything out. All right, Maybe I'll do a part two to this
where I do more work. But for right now, that's a drivable driveway.
He kinda said in a mumblely understated way 71... yeah that's $71K lol.
Not a bad driveway for one days work