What's Next with the Road
Added 2023-08-08 18:01:00 +0000 UTCThis summer we've made major progress with our Road Build Project and we wanted to give our Patrons an overview and a sneak peak of what we'll be sharing on the channel in the upcoming weeks:
- We're taking the steepest stretch of the road from about a 25% grade and trying to get it closer to a 12% grade. This involves using the dozer to level and move earth and rock from one end of the road to the other.
- We bought our new-to-us Hitachi excavator and rented a Cat 330 excavator with a rock hammer to get this job done.
- One part of the project we did not anticipate is how hard the rock would start getting the deeper we went. When we started working through the rock on the surface we were able to remove a significant amount of rock at a time. We've learned that this is because of the freeze/thaw cycle - over thousands of years as water seeps into the rock closer to the surface it will break the rock apart. The lack of daily progress became pretty discouraging compared to how much rock we were able to move in a day when we started.
- Have you been wondering where the Army Truck has been with this project or why we haven't been filming it in action? Early on Riley accidently backed it into a boulder and broke the drive shaft.
- What we are posting next is more equipment repairs. We've made improvements to the electrical situation with the Hitachi but we'll work on other issues, and we'll share some unfortunate major issues with the Dozer.
