Today's goal is to teach you guys how we deal with the
worst digging conditions that we have in our particular region. It's not solid rock, and it's not frozen ground, although this is probably
gonna be a little bit frozen, but what we have today is old riverbed. This is about as bad as it gets for us, and the reason that it is is because we have nothing but cobble, washed cobble, it doesn't
have any fractured edges, so it's real smooth, and so our hole's wanna
walk all over the place, and at the same time, they call it binding agents, I think, so there's no topsoil that gets gummy when it gets wet. So we can't just add water to this, 'cause it just drains away. It's nothing but river rock, round river rock, and sand. And so any time we try and dig a hole, we're just gonna end up
with a great big crater. We can shovel as much we want, but eventually, and it
eventually will stop, but we'll end up with something much larger than what we wanted, and it's really hard to get it to depth. A lot of our specs that we run into call for 42 inches of depth, and trying to get that here
can be very challenging. So we'll see how good we can do today. Our goal is to end up with a 12-inch hole that's 42 inches deep, so that we're not using
extra energy and effort trying to get the soils
around it compacted or extra concrete. So one of the first things
that we're always considering when we dig in rocky ground is we're making our Xs a lot larger than we normally would. And the reason for that being is we're anticipating that
auger walking off of it and us needing to try and pinpoint where that hole should be so that we don't have
to come back later on, move our holes or hand-shave our holes. And this is our pink paint, love the pink paint. This is 249, Aervoe 249 paint, which we love. Get that from ToolUp. We've already dropped a
link in another video, but if you want a refresher
on where we get that from, we get it from ToolUp. And you'll find out a little bit more about why we prefer the
shovel over the clam hole, or the clamshell diggers,
or the double shovels. I'm not gonna say these
things don't have a place, but on our trucks they
just don't serve us well, and so we've never found any value of carrying these around. We've got a standard shovel here. And what we like to do when
we're digging 9-inch holes is we'll take a grinder, and we'll basically trim this shovel down to about that wide. And when we trim that shovel
down to about that wide, it fits in 9-inch hole so that we're able to still
get into a 9-inch hole. Without further ado, we're gonna hop in the old Bobcat here. So we got big augers. This is a high-flow machine, which means that when we
kick it into high-flow, we can turn up our revolutions. And sometimes that's handy, sometimes it's not. We'll probably start at digging this hole a fairly slow speed, or as slow as our skid steer will go. And then, if we need to, to clean things up or really pack that, what we can get is a
lotta wobble in our auger, and that'll help us
pack that hole back out once we get our secret ingredient added. All of our augers are cast head, which a lotta the ones that you're gonna see in
your rental fleets are, they have bolt-on teeth. And so when they're just steel, they'll end up bending down here, and then these teeth'll rotate underneath, and then once that happens, all your teeth'll be
pointed straight down. You'll just throw teeth
all over the place, and your augers are basically ruined. So if you're gonna be
in the fence business, or if you got really
touch digging conditions, it's worth it to find somebody that has one of these as opposed to a non-cast head auger. Basically it's just probably
some sorta high carbon steel. The other thing you'll see on our augers is we add, we hard-surface all the
edges all the way up, and then we add a little
bit of a ridge of rebar, and that just helps keep
dirt stuck to the auger, so that when we run into
real dry conditions, you people back in a lotta the areas where you have a lotta rain don't have to worry about that. But out here, it's just
gets popcorn fart dry is what we like to call. And when that happens, everything just wants to
slide right off the auger, and it's hard to get it to come out of the hole without water. So that's why we put
the rebar on our augers. You'll also notice we go with the hex head rather than the round. The reason is is we're putting a lotta
torque on these augers, and without a good hex head, we just end up running
through these shear pins, because then all the force
is on this pin right here, but with a hex head, it's actually on the
shaft of the auger itself. Now we'll go over here and see what the digging
conditions look like. (upbeat rock music) Now we've got our hole, and you can see what kind of a mess. I'm gonna guess right now we're probably about two feet in diameter, and you can see we're left
with nothing with cobble. We could work here at
this hole all day long, trying to clean it out with the auger, and the only thing we're gonna pull out is what little dirt we have. This isn't quite as sandy
as I would like to see it, so there's a chance that maybe we could add just water and be okay with this. But in a lot of cases around this area, water's not gonna do it. Down underneath this, there's a little bit of topsoil here, but down underneath this, I guarantee you it's primarily sand. So we can get in here and we can do this, and after a bit, we'll get all these rocks out. These are fairly worthless. I could spend a lotta time here working with a set of those and not really get anywhere. This is bad enough, but you can see how much more material with a shovel. We should be at our 42 inches, and that's, when we're
digging holes commercially, 42 inches is what we're shooting for. And let's say that I'm
trying to hand-dig a hole next to utilities, with one of these, I'm disturbing a lot more area, because I'm trying to pound
through it with these, and it's really hard to be super careful. So hand-digging around utilities, what we like is we like this. So let's say this is our utility mark, and the utility company had marked it, obviously we would not be using our skid steer to drill this hole. But what we can do is we can start out
here away from our mark and dig very carefully
with the tip of our bar. And we have a lot of weight, but we can also dig right here, whereas, if I was using a
set of post hole diggers, I'd have a surface here, plus I'd have one over close to here. Now if I turn it this way, I still have something
that's crossing my utility, and I'm really having to
put a lot of force on that. So using a digging bar and being cautious, and then using a shovel, where all I'm doing is
pulling out loose dirt, gives me a lot smaller surface area where I can be effective and kinda pinpoint where I'm
directing my energy towards, hopefully away from that utility. Now we got all that out (shovel scraping) let's put it back in and we'll keep going, 'cause this is really a lot to do. So you might think I'm crazy, but if we're doing the technique
that we're talking about, I do want as much of that
dirt in the hole as possible. We're gonna try it with water and just see what happens
with just plain water and see if we can be effective. Don't be afraid to refresh your marks or give yourself a little bit better idea. Uh, bucket. (water sloshing) Okay, I'm gonna save a little bit. We'll drill down, and then we'll try and add some more if it looks like it's working at all. (energetic rock music) So you can see that I
kicked that auger speed up, and that's done by using our high-flow. We're just basically running more volume through our hydraulic pump, and that gives us less torque, so it'll stall out faster at high flow. But once we get it to this point, we can, you can see we're still pretty dry. I mean, this is just the dry ground that we run into here. If there's any big, large, obvious rocks, usually we have somebody on
the outside of the skid steer, and they're trying to pull the rocks, these big rocks away. What happens, if they fall in the hole, they don't want us to kick the auger off. And once we've finally got the auger down right on top of our X, we're trying to keep it there. And these rocks will throw
us off all over the place if we don't pull 'em outta the hole. We can add some more water. We'll have a lot more. It looks like this is
gonna work perfectly. I love it when a plan comes together. (water sloshing) (energetic rock music) Dang it, that worked too well. (tape measure shearing) (epic cinematic music) Oh, we gotta go down
like another four inches, four or five inches, we gotta go deeper. There are times you're
gonna run into this, and we don't have enough topsoil here with a binding agent to be able to bind all that together. It doesn't matter how much water you add, it'll just drain away. So we'll show you on another hole how we deal with that. So you can see how those rocks are kicking him off of his mark, so he's having to dig wherever it'll start going down. (machine whirring) But eventually his goal is to get that auger all the way sunk, all the way down into the ground and get it right on top of his X. And so I'll guide him if I need to, 'cause he might not be able to see, but having that big X
helps us keep our line after we've got a big blown-out mess. (machine whirring) Yeah, this one's not gonna work so good. That's too nice. So his hole moved almost six
inches off the center line, so he's gotta try and
get it back to the center so we get concrete all the way around it. This is exactly what we deal with. You get it down, but
it's in the wrong spot, and you don't wanna have to hand-dig it. So now he's gonna move
that hole with his auger, but we're gonna have a mess. So you can see he finally
got his hole down here right where we want it, but we got a little bit
of a cratered-out mess. We know already that
this soil's got enough, if we add moisture, that
it'll bind together, but we'll show you what else we can do that'll make it really bind. (machine whirring) (bag crinkling) So what this is is bentonite. And I guarantee you, when we're done, we will absolutely have a beautiful hole. It makes really, really gooey mud. So it'll bind all the rocks. If we didn't have any sands or anything, if it was just nothing but sand, it'd bind all that and
basically just stick together. And if you put this in a hole and you add a little bit of water, let's say it's a summer day or something, you come back a couple hours later, it'll harden like concrete. I mean it just gets super hard. 42 inches deep, that's
what we're looking for, 42. (auger grinding) He's gonna run that
auger in a couple times, just kinda let that stuff
fall back down to the bottom, and that's why we don't
clear any of the dirt. We just let that dirt sit there and kind of build up a cone around it that gets harder and wetter. And he'll run it in now
there a couple times. We'll just watch for the moisture and try and get the
right moisture content, mix all the way down to the bottom, and eventually we'll
have a 42-inch deep hole that's exactly 12 inches. I'll just dump it all in there. There you go, there it is, get it. (machine whirring) (shovel scraping) (tape measure shearing) Oh, he's an overachiever. We got, like, probably 46 degrade, and we didn't put a
shovel in there one time. But this technique works in some of the worst digging conditions. When you're just gonna end up with a hole that big, it doesn't matter if it's sand or whatever else it is, anytime the water's just gonna drain away as fast as you can add it in there and nothing really binds together, the bentonite is the trick. I mean, it's just, and the sun hits that on a good sunny day, and it'll dry like concrete. So give that a try the next time you're struggling
to get your holes dug, and make sure that you
have the right auger, because you'll just throw teeth and cost a buncha money. This is actually a
pretty heavy-duty auger. Hopefully you enjoyed this, hope you learned something. If you like what we're doing, make sure and give us a thumbs up, like the video, hit the notification bell so you know the next time we
show you some tips and tricks, you don't miss out on anything we put out. And until next time, you
have a good dang day. This is good stuff. You know why we have these
little horses like this? It's 'cause when we video 'em, they take up less hard drive space, a lot smaller. The files get pretty big when you video, so video small things, and the files aren't quite as large. I'm always thinkin'.
