How to make digging holes easier ?

[Steve Firth]

I thought so, but it seemed to be about average at the time I bought it. Three on sale all around the same price. I bought mine from a nice man in South Wales who was a Hardly Doesn'tRun enthusiast, he used his motorhome to tow it all the way to my house and refused payment for the fuel.

It had issues I must say, and this year will need a selection of new hydraulic hose, but nothing too major and has worked well for the past three years.

Biggest problem with them is that they don't have any drive to the wheels and don't have a 350º pivot. You learn to cope and use the arm to hoik the thing around the land.

Towing it 1500 miles south was "interesting". Great fun in France when the strap holding the arm down broke and the arm flipped into the air and a buttock-clenching session when a crap French autoroute resulted in the tail wagging the dog.

Heh, possibly.

[Tim Streater]

My C4 doesn't have a trenching attachment but it does get 60mpg.

[Gefreiter Krueger]

My Golf gets 56mpg, and it can pull up hedges.

[Andrew Mawson]

A Plough or A Rotavator !

AWEM

[harryagain]

You will additionally need a pick or a mattock. And possibly a heavy bar. You want a pointy spade, square ones are much harder work.

Wheel barrow to move the excavate.

And a well thought out plan to avoid double handling the excavate.

Eg will you need a skip or can it be disposedof on site? Eg Get the barrow by the hole and throw the muck straight into it. If so, can you get a skip with a side door? (Saves getting it over the side). Cost of tipping is huge if you can't . (Landfill tax)

If you are unused to manual work break yourself in gradually. Do a bit everynight. Start with a half hour and work up to it. It's very easy to permanently f*ck up your back.

Are you aquainted with any Poles or Lithuanians?

[Farmer Giles]

It does get easier, but a mattock would help. One of these might help too - farmers use them all the time when digging holes in stony ground:

[Tim Lamb]

In message , MrWeld writes

From the response, everyone knows about digging holes...

For clay with stones (hoggin?) I think a pickaxe better than the broad points of a mattock. Strong shovel for removing loosened soil and the heavy 4 pronged fork used by anyone digging for a living. I've acquired several over the years; usually left behind by navvies laying pipe/cable on the farm. The conventional wooden handle is reinforced with a steel strip front and back which adds weight to do some of the pickaxe work.

>

[Tim Watts]

On Sunday 14 July 2013 20:05 Farmer Giles wrote in uk.d-i-y:

Agree - been using a mattock on some hard dry soil this week. It breaks the soil up with little effort leaving shoveling of loose material only which is a lot easier than "digging". Also makes light work of small roots.

[Farmer Giles]

But clearly you think you know more about it than anyone else...

[alan]

[newshound]

Well if it was me it would be a no brainer, I would buy a second hand Powerfab or other mini digger and sell it afterwards. (Or more likely keep it).

[Lobster]

C'mon, you can't just throw that on here asking for advice, without saying WHY?!

[Nightjar]

That is deep enough to trap you if it collapses when you are standing in it. You need to consider how to summon help if that happens, or take precautions, such as shoring, to prevent it. Sticky when wet suggests clay, which has a very nasty habit of allowing you to cut vertical sides when dry, but collapsing at a shallow angle in the rain. Make sure you stack any excavated soil well clear of the trench (at least 8ft / 2.4m), to avoid loading on the soil alongside it, unless it is adequately shored of course.

Colin Bignell

[Matty F]

I agree. We could come up with alternative solutions, such as making a 90x50x3000 wooden box, and dumping lots of soil around it, then moving the box to the next bit.

[dennis]

shallow graves for tall people? foundations for a garden monorail? scale model Stonehenge?

[RobertL]

When my father in-law (in his 70s) dug the 1000mm deep trench foundations for our extension he needed a pick axe to dig the bottom 6" of the trench because the ground was packed so hard.

It took him about 1 day per metre of trench length IIRC.

Robert

[Jethro_uk]

Huh ? 90 *cm* deep ?

Did you mistake length for depth ;)

[Nightjar]

A collapse in a trench that deep is unlikely to be fatal, but it certainly could trap a person by the legs. If there is nobody around to dig them out, that could be a serious problem.

Colin Bignell

[Roger Chapman]

When you are in a hole the usual recommendation is to stop digging. ;-)

Mattocks come in two flavours. The traditional one has an axe opposite the adze but you can also get one with a conventional pick opposite and that is a more versatile tool than a straight pickaxe. Still need an axe for any roots though.

FWIW when I dug out the clay floor of my barn I found the most effective combination of tools was a garden fork and a sledge hammer. The hammer was used in place of a foot as stamping on the fork made no impression on the hard ground. A little bit of experimentation was required to avoid burying the fork too deep or too far from the edge of the cut that no amount of heaving on the handle would loosen the clod.

[Jethro_uk]

in which case you *really* don't want to read this: