digging a small trench foundation by hand?

[RobertL]

Can anyone give me idea how long it would take a healthy man to dig a trench foundation 5m long by 450mm wide, 1000m m deep?

I'm trrying to decide if it's worth hiring a digger for the job.

thanks,

Robert

[RobertL]

using a spade of course... not literally by hand.

R

[The Natural Philosopher]

a fit labourer..probably a day or so.

Me? about three one of each in any given week, and teh rest spent flat on my back gasping.

Just about possible with a mini digger though a 3.5 tonner would be ideal.

[John Rumm]

So much depends on the state of the ground and local soil conditions. If its a relatively easy dig then its doable in a day to a day and a half. If on the other hand its hard going, then significantly longer. It also depends on what you are going to do with the spoil. Assuming you just log it beside the trench while you dig, you are going to have anything up to three and a half cubic metres (allowing for some "bulking up") to shift after.

A mini digger ought to do it in a day without any difficulty.

[Ian Jackson]

If the ground is difficult, a compromise might be to hire an electric 'pneumatic' drill to do the really hard work.

[TheScullster]

Personally (with no experience of this whatsoever) it would seem quite a tricky job to dig a narrow trench quite that deep. You'll certainly need a back that's in better shape than mine!

Phil

[Nightjar]

My Home Guard Manual tells me that two men can dig a 6 ft long fire trench to the first stage (3 ft deep, 3'6" wide at the top and 2' wide at the bottom) in four hours. For a fire trench, the waste soil is used to make a parapet, so removing it would add to the time.

I suspect that 450mm wide might be a bit narrow to work in easily and 1m is deep enough to run the risk of being trapped by a trench collapse, so I would go for the digger anyway.

Colin Bignell

[Paul - xxx]

Having recently seen similar being dug up at my school (I'm school caretaker/site supervisor) I'd suggest getting a man in or a digger!

We had a 15m long x 450 x 450 trench for some electrical 'stuff' dug and where the ground is soil it's relatively easy, where it's not, it's not! Took them about a day with a skid-steer mini-digger and two blokes with shovels ... the shovels were more to lean on than anything else .. ;)

[Andy Dingley]

Round here I could easily do it in a day. Back in Bristol (heavy clay) it would have taken me two, in Northern Ireland (unimproved heavy clay with boulders in) it would have been three. In Ireland I couldn't dig a trench this narrow - I'd hit so many boulders that I'd be forever widening it to get them lifted out.

If you can afford it and you have easy access, why not enjoy yourself?

8-)

[Steve Firth]

I have, in the past, done the work in clay soil, in a rainstorm, using a long-handled shovel. I had an incentive, a barn was flooding and needed an emergency drain. The long handled shovel really helps. British spades are useless in comparison. But it was a long hard day and I don't want to do it again, ever.

[Steve Firth]

back gasping.

I have just finished digging a trench of the same section, for drainage, using a 0.75 tonne micro digger. The digger cost less than £3k to buy. The quote from a contractor for the work was £6k. Hiring a digger should certainly be worth it, but buying one made sense for me, because I have about 12 months more digging to do.

The length of the drain is 60 metres and the job took one (long) day. The subsoil is boulder clay, so about as heavy going as one can get.

[mike]

I ran your question through Google Translate and this is what it came up with:

God, I'm so excited. I have the perfect opportunity to hire a minidigger but the wife is giving me shit about the cost. I just need to give myself deniability and make it look like I've done the research. Please tell me if I do the job by hand I'll likely slip a disk 'cause there's a JCB with my name on it.

[Nick Leverton]

This should be a good test for all the posters discussing maths exams :)

Nick

[ARWadsworth]

It is tricky. My new water supply was at least 750mm deep but only 1 spade wide.

The lad that dug it for me did a very good job:-)

[Andy Dingley]

I have several similar manuals of field engineering. The rates for digging are so optimistic that I can only assume they're the rates for troops sandwiched between the Beastly Hun ahead and a barking RSM behind.

[Nightjar]

I suspect the figures mostly come from the Great War, so that is probably not far off the mark.

Colin Bignell

[RobertL]

Thank you all for your help. My father-in-law (who is visiting us from transilvania) wants to help us with our extension and he assures us, from his experience digging graves, that he can do it in a couple of days.

Robert

[The Natural Philosopher]

Its not that dificult, but its bloody hard work!

The sort of work almost no one understands, these days.

(having spent 4 hours yesterday trying and eventually succeeding, in making 3 400mm deep holes in sun baked clay for some posts to go into, teaspoon by teaspoon, literally. Took 5 hours).

[The Natural Philosopher]

An Irish Navvy could dig and wheel barrow 30 tonnes in a (proper guiness fuelled) day.

Thes re figures from the days when unskilled labour didn't mean lying on your back, having a pethidine injection and a Caesarian..

[Tim Downie]

Not got something like this?

tool.

Tim