Our Secrets to Digging Fence Post Holes in Rocky Ground

Today's goal is to show you how we deal with the worst

digging

conditions we have in our particular region. It's not solid rock or frozen

ground

, although it will probably be a little frozen, but what we have today is an ancient river bed. This is the worst thing we can do for ourselves and the reason it is is because we have nothing but washed pavers. It's not, it has no fractured edges, so it's very soft and our

holes

want to walk all over it. and at the same time they call them binding agents, I think there is no top layer of soil that gets gummy when it gets wet, so we can't just add water to it because it just runs off, it's just river rock around river rock and sand, etc.

Every time we try to dig a hole, we end up with a big crater that we can shovel as much as we want, but eventually it will stop, but we will end up with something much bigger than we wanted and it is really difficult to reach the depth, many of our specifications require 42 inches deep and trying to achieve that here can be a big challenge so we'll see how well we can do today. Our goal is to finish. with a 12 inch hole that is 42 inches deep so that we are not using extra energy and effort trying to compact the soils around it or extra concrete, so one of the first things we always consider when

digging

rocky

terrain is that we're making our x's much larger than we normally would and the reason for this is that we're anticipating the bit coming out of it and we need to try to identify where that hole should be so that we don't.

I don't have to come back later to move our

holes

or shave by hand and this is our pink paint. I love the pink paint. This is the uh 249 or arvo or airvo 249 paint that we love. Get it from the tool. We have already left a link. in another video, but if you want to update where we get it from, we get it from the tool up and you'll find out a little bit more about why we prefer the shovel over the clam hole now that I'm not the shell digger. or double shovels, I'm not going to say these things have no place, but in our trucks they just don't serve us well, so we've never found any value in carrying them. standard scoop here and what we like to do when we make nine nine inch holes is we take a grinder and we basically trim this scoop down to about that width and when we trim that scoop down to about that width it fits into a nine inch hole so we can still going into a nine inch hole without further ado we're going to get on the old bobcat here so we've got big augers this is a high flow machine meaning when we kick in high flow we can increase our revs and sometimes that's useful, sometimes it's not, we'll probably start digging this hole at a fairly slow speed or as slow as our skid steer can go and then if necessary clean things up or really pack up what we can get is a big swing in our auger and that will help us plug that hole again once we add our secret ingredient all of our augers have cast heads which is what a lot of the ones you're doing We'll see in their rental fleets if they have screw-on teeth and when they're just steel, they're going to end up bending here and then these teeth are going to turn down and then once that happens all of their teeth are going to point down. you'll just throw teeth everywhere and your augers will basically be ruined, so if you're going to be in the defense business or have really tough digging conditions, it's worth finding someone who has one of these as opposed to a uncast head auger, basically it's probably some type of high carbon steel.

The other thing you'll see on our augers is that we add a hard surface on all the edges all the way to the top and then we add a little bit of rebar ridge and that just helps keep the dirt stuck to the auger so when we run into Really dry conditions, you guys, in a lot of areas where it rains a lot, you don't have to worry about that, but out here it just dries up the popcorn fart is what we like to call it and when that happens, everything just wants to slide off. of the bit and it is difficult to get it out of the hole without water, that is why we put the rebar in our bits.

You will also notice that we use the hex head instead of the round one, the reason is that we are applying a lot of torque to these augers and without a good hex head we just end up going through these secure pins because then all the force is on This pin is here, but with the hex head it is actually on the shaft of the auger. Now we'll go over here and see what the digging conditions look like now that we have our hole and you can see what kind of mess there is. I'm going to guess that at this point we're probably about two feet in diameter and you can see we're not left with any pavers.

We could work here in this hole all day trying to clean it out with the auger and the only thing. what we are going to take out is the little soil we have, this is not as sandy as I would like to see it, so there is a possibility that maybe we can add just water and be okay with this, but in many cases around this area , water is not going to work under this, there is a little bit of topsoil here, but under this I guarantee you it's mostly sand, so we can come in here and we can do this and after a little bit we'll get all of these. rocks, these are pretty useless, it's just that I could spend a lot of time here working with a set of those and get nowhere, this is bad enough, but you can see how much more material with a shovel we should have at our disposal. 42 inches and that's when we're digging holes commercially 42 inches is what we're looking for and let's say I'm trying to dig a hole by hand next to the utilities with one of these, I'm disturbing a lot more area because I'm trying to get through it with these and it's really hard to be very careful, so digging by hand in the utilities, what we like is we like this, so let's say this is our utility brand and the utility company had it marked, obviously we wouldn't use it. our skid steer to drill this hole, but what we can do is start here away from our mark and dig very carefully with the tip of our bar and we have a lot of weight, but we can also dig right here, whereas if we were using a set of

post

hole diggers, I would have a surface here and I would have one near here now, if I turn it this way I still have something that is crossing my utility and I really have to put a lot of force into it, so use a digging bar and Being cautious and then using a shovel where all I do is scoop up loose dirt gives me a much smaller surface area where I can be effective and pinpoint where I'm directing my energy. towards hopefully moving away from that usefulness now that we take all that out let's put it back in and we'll continue because this is really what we do so you might think I'm crazy but if we're doing the technique we are.

Speaking of which, I want as much of that dirt in the hole as possible. We're going to try it with water and see what happens with just plain water and see if we can be effective. Don't be afraid to refresh your brands. Give yourself a little bit of a better idea, okay, I'm going to save a little bit, we'll dig deeper and then try to add a little bit more if it looks like it's working so you can see that I kicked that spin. accelerate and voila, you're done using our high flow. Basically we are putting more volume through our hydraulic pump and it is giving us less torque so it will stop faster at high flow but once we get to this point. we can see we're still pretty dry, I mean this is just the dry

ground

that we run into here, if there are big obvious rocks, we usually have someone on the outside of the skid steer and they're trying to pull these big rocks away.

What happens if they fall into the hole? So it wants to kick the auger and once we finally get the auger down right on top of our x, we're trying to keep it there and these rocks will throw us. everywhere if we don't get them out of the hole so we can add a little more water we'll have a lot more this looks like it's going to work perfectly I love it when a plan comes together damn it worked too well oh we have to go down another four inches , four or five inches, we have to go deeper.

There are times when we run into this and we don't have enough top layer of soil here with binding agent to be able to bind all of that together. No matter how much water you add, it's just going to run off, so we'll show you in another hole how we deal with that so you can see how those rocks are knocking it off target and it has to dig wherever. It will start to go down, but eventually your goal is to sink that auger all the way into the ground and get it right on top of your ex, so I'll guide you if I have to because you might not be able to. to see, but having that big , so you have to try to get it out.

Bring it back to the center so we have concrete around it and that's exactly what we deal with. Take it down, but it's in the wrong place. You don't have to dig it by hand, so he will move that hole. its auger but we're going to have a mess as you can see it finally got its hole here right where we want it but we've got a bit of a cratered mess we already know the ground has enough if we add moisture it will bind together but we'll show you what more we can do to really make it come together, so this is a folded night and I guarantee that when we're done we'll have a beautiful hole that makes really, really. sticky mud, so it would bind all the rocks together if we didn't have sand or something, if it was just sand it would bind all of that together and basically stick together and if you put this in a hole and add a little bit of water, let's say it's a summer day or something, you come back a couple of hours later, it will harden like concrete, I mean it gets super hard, 42 inches deep, that's what we're looking for 42. because it's going to run. that auger a couple of times just let that stuff fall to the bottom and that's why we don't clean the dirt, we just let the dirt sit there and build a cone around it that gets harder and wetter and now it's going to push it in there a couple of times we'll just look at the moisture and try to get the right moisture content mix all the way to the bottom and eventually we'll have a 42 inch deep hole that's exactly 12 inches I'll just dump it all in there there you go , get it, oh he's a high achiever, we probably got like 46 degrees and we didn't put a shovel in there once, but this technique works in some of the worst cases. digging conditions where you're going to end up with a hole that big, it doesn't matter if it's sand or anything else, any minute the water is going to drain away as fast as you can add it in there and nothing really ties the part together overnight is the trick, I mean it's fair and the sun hits that on a good sunny day and it will dry like concrete so try that next time you're struggling to dig your holes and make sure you have the right auger because you'll just throw up teeth and it'll cost a lot of money and this is actually a pretty tough auger.

Hopefully you enjoyed this hope, you will have learned something, if you like what we are doing, make sure to like the video, hit the notification bell so you know that next time we show you some tips or tricks you won't miss nothing we

post

ed and until next time have a good day, this is a good thing. you know why we have these wheelies like that just because when we record them on video they take up less dive space, they're a lot smaller, the files get pretty big when you record video, so you record small things and the files aren't as big. always thinking