Smooth Ride for my Cubs

[Rudi]

I was meaning to post this much earlier like back on the 1st of August .. but well life happens.

As many know I have been playing with a lot of heavy equipment over the last 15 years or so as we built my logging road and such which included the trout pond, restoring the trout brook behind our house as well as some other work. Got to play with an IH/Dresser TD7/8, a Cat D2, JD 644D and E series loaders as well as a bunch of other equipment.



Ended up with a pretty nice road and all as well as a redone main parking area by the house. Only problem was that heavy rains tended to wash the driveway down well the driveway Not a big deal as we had the equipment to play with and fix things up including the drag that we used to level the gravel with Ellie.



And playing with the drag is a lot of fun.

But sometimes really nice things happen right out of the blue that tends to change things. Such a thing happened to us this summer. One afternoon .. just around my birthday got a phone call while we were in the van. Guy wanted to know if I was home and if we could meet. Told him I was out running with Em and could be home soon, he said.. well take your time.. would say 8pm be ok for a meeting. Said sure.. finished what we were doing and drove home. He was there by the time we got home. Introduced each other and then he asked me a strange question.

Wanted to know if I could use some stock for my driveway. I asked how much. He said enough to do the driveway. I said sure When He asked me if 0800 the next morning was soon enough... I said sure.

Anyways, the equipment arrived and shortly afterwards a parade of 36 live-loaders with an average of 29 metric tons of stock in each showed up at our house...



By 2pm they had finished and most of the equipment was gone. Just left me with about a weeks worth of seat time on a Bomag roller/compactor(similar to this one, gotta find a pic of Monarch's Bomag).



After almost 1,100 tons of stock this is what we ended up with It will certainly be a lot smoother from now on and a lot easier to plow this winter





The drag pictured below has now been moved way down the road where there isn't any blacktop. Gonna be used solely for the logging road.



A nice pad beside the storage trailer to park the trailers and other implements





It ain't perfect, but it was a lot of fun rolling as well as watching some really cool surfacing equipment play in the yard

[Goraidh (Jeff)]

Lookin' good, Rudi.

[Rob in NH]

nice driveway, when i win the lottery mine will be like that

[cowboy]

Cool Rudi

Awesome Birthday present As Grandpa used to say "That sure do make it nice." And ya did a great job with it. I love those rollers with the vibrating drum. I wish I had one at the farm to run down my trails from time to time. It does a great job pushing rocks down and making the roads smooth. Do you have any better pictures of the drag? That sure looks like a good one. I have one I welded up out of some heavy angle iron but it doesn't do that good of a job.

Billy

[Rudi]

Billy:

Thanks. This was what I had meant by that sudden project that popped up. Right out of the blue..... I like the little Bomag's as well, they are pretty darn useful. For packing down the road the vibrator really helps. To roll the millings I had the girls wet it down as I was rolling it. It really compacted nice. Having a hot week to do it really helped seal it.

I will go get some more pics of the drag maybe by Wednesday/Thursday. It has been raining solid for over a week. We must be at 200 millimeters and counting. It is an old snowmobile trail groomer that was cut down last year so Ellie could pull it. Works slick and is really useful.

[John(videodoc)]

I would love to have that at my place, any chance he will be in my area with some extra?

[cowboy]

Cool Rudi

Hope it dries up for you. Those long fall rains sure make a mess! There was a bunch of stuff I wanted to get done last time I was at the farm. But that wind storm brought me to a complete stop on what I was planing on doing as I would have been dragging mud everywhere. That groomer would have been nice to the trails smoothed off before it rained so it wouldn't hold the water. But that is one good thing about having a lot of projects. You can usually find one to work on when you can't do others.

Billy

[John *.?-!.* cub owner]

Hope you got a good job. in this part of the country we get some itinerant pavers that come through the area and "just happen to have" enough material left over from a big job to do your driveway. You end up with a poor quality job with junk material that breaks up in a year or two, and no way to get them back to fix it.

[Rudi]

Billy:

It stopped raining. Hope to get out today to take a couple of pics.

EJ:

There are examples of precisely that here as well, however this isn't one of them. This was a gimme .. It cost me nada so whatever I have is a plus no matter what. Hoping to be able to share the wealth shall we say next year when the next phase of the project begins....