Kirbstone wrote:Yer-average 'digger' in these here parts tends to be a JCB, the initials of its inventor, and is basically a tractor with two buckets operated by hydraulics, one arm at the back, usually with a narrow bucket on for digging trenches, but two big arms at the front with a big bulldozer blade between for levelling areas & shoving things around. They can drive to sites under their own steam along normal roads.
That design rather sounds like what we have lots of here and are sourced from several different manufacturers. The one I got to run was a little "Caterpillar" (aka, "CAT") machine.
Elder types tended to look like
this little guy who lives in the front yard of a stone-crushing business a few miles to my north. He disappeared for a little while a year ago, and I got rather sad about the matter. However, all was for the better, and quite unlike the rather sad photo in the link above he got a new coat of paint and a little patch of gravel to sit on instead of the unforgiving macadam. I'll try to remember my camera the next time I drive by and ask to take a few shots
To dig our lake here in 2001 they also used a hi-mac, this time with a 10-meter arm and a very seriously large bucket on the end. They made a sloping ramp down into the hole and drove the thing down it, excavating most of the area from the bottom and swinging bucketfulls of clay up and over to waiting dumper trucks. Great fun and I didn't get a go at working any of the machinery myself.
That's a pity. I rather expect you would have enjoyed it greatly.
To cope with the water table they contoured the lake with sides sloping down like Motorway embankments to avoid soil creep.
That lesson was learnt during the construction of any number of canals. It's called the "angle of repose" and represents the maximum gradient that the banks can be expected to be stable in. I get to deal with that notion in piling snow up around the driveway in the winter-time.
