EC Starts A New Business

so i'm standing behind my shop this morning you can see the back side of the cave over there and i'm standing more importantly next to some of brian reynolds equipment he's going to put this stuff to work today smoothing up a little piece of storage space that i have across the road i'm taking a chapter out of nate's playbook and upgrading a little piece of ground that's pretty rough and has had junk cars parked on it for a long time so you're going to get a chance to see brian smooth out the grade roll out the road fabric and put a whole bunch of rock on top of it the ace in the hole we have today is that where there happens to be a rock pit a half a mile from where i'm standing and so at least the road time will be small even if the grading time is big this is the first step in a series that you're probably going to see more about i'm going to essentially sort of copy what nate did i'm you're going to see gravel you're going to see excavation and compaction you're going to see chain-link fence you might see some shipping containers for storage i don't know about that you'll probably see some lighting it's going to stretch out over a while and it feels like a little project that's not all that little but i can tell you it's been a long time coming it's going to be a nice improvement to this little part of the world and it's going to give us another chance to see the huge advantage it is to have access to someone with heavy equipment who knows how to run it so let's get to it so i've been spraying the grass on this lot off and on with roundup for the last couple of months to kill the grass to stop the growth and reduce how much of that green material we were going to have to deal with today the reason for that is that anything that's organic that's included in structural fill whether it's grass or roots or branches or stumps or anything else is going to rot over time when it rots it's going to leave voids in the fill which will settle and destroy the compaction so that in fact you don't have structural fill you've got loose material that is not going to stand up to the use and abuse of a parking lot over time since we're not building a roadway or a building pad i'm comfortable with simply scraping this small amount of material off to the edges of the site rolling it in place and moving ahead [Music] now with heavy equipment just like any other process in construction peak efficiency lies in the trade-off between speed and power big i mean really big equipment has the power to move much more material i mean think of mining the equipment is monstrously big but it's slower not only in terms of how nimble it is on the ground and how quickly can move around but it's way more difficult to move big equipment in between jobs so mobilizing and demobilizing becomes expensive small equipment on the other hand is really easy to get on and off small jobs you can haul it on tilt deck trailers behind dump trucks but it just doesn't deal with huge amounts of dirt easily even though it moves around quickly brian's machinery on this job in my opinion is sort of a i don't know a mama bear solution right it is just right it's the ideal compromise between mobility and productivity on the job he brought two 10 yard dump trucks a d5c bulldozer with a six-way blade on the front two skid steer loaders an old case and a much newer and heavier takauchi and a vibratory roller with four operators this made for a very very efficient excavation crew [Music] [Music] these rolls of black sheeting that we're rolling out is called road fabric it's a super tough woven plastic material of some sort that reduces the amount of crushed rock that must be put in place to create a long lasting surface think of it like snowshoes and soft powder it distributes the point loads of the wheel traffic over a much wider area on the subgrade what this means for me today is that we can get away with putting eight to twelve inches of one inch minus crushed rock over the top of this fabric putting it in place and rolling it down tight and it should make a very long lasting parking area that will need only minor maintenance now this would not be enough under an actual road for instance carrying heavy loads with pounding moving traffic wouldn't even be close to enough material regardless of the fabric it wouldn't even be enough under a building site or a real parking lot maybe but for this application where the traffic will be light moving slowly it's going to be just right now the gravel that you're watching go into place here is crushed basalt is a volcanic rock and it's pretty much what we're resting on all over here in southern oregon the process of crushing rock is fascinating and even though i don't know much about it i do know that after being broken out of the ground by blasting the rock begins to be crushed and sorted down to progressively smaller sizes by passing it through or over vibrating screens most of the material that we used was one inch minus and that means it's everything that would fall through a vibrating screen with one inch square openings but this material right here is three inch minus because we're needing to put it in really thick like 24 to 36 inches in this one area and the larger rock provides more strength than a deeper fill besides that it's a little less money so it's the right stuff at the right [Music] place [Music] do [Music] my little orange kubota and i had a good time out here working with the big boys and maybe maybe we actually helped the process a little but not much this is a handy little machine but it's nowhere near the dirt mover that these other tools are especially when they've got brian reynolds or dexter henry sitting in this driver's seat thank you for watching essential craftsman keep up the good work [Music] so [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Essential Craftsman

Views: 169,103

Keywords: anvil, forge, blacksmith, forging, craftsman, mentor, trades, tradesman, career, smith, carpetner, builder, wisdom, workbench, fabricate, tools, tool, tips, trick, hacks, protip

Id: niG42cyeU7Q

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021