Page 12 - Moving the Earth_ The Workbook of Excavation

LAND CLEARING AND CONTROLS

1.12 THE WORK

FIGURE 1.4 Clearing with a disc harrow. (Courtesy of Rome Plow Co.)

Both the plow and the harrow tend to create ridges and troughs in the ground surface, because
they move loosened dirt to the side.
A rolling chopper knocks down, tears, and mashes both brush and trees, and cuts near-the-surface
roots. A small portion of its cutting is buried.
Carrier. When the final cleanup of any kind of brush clearing is done by hand, it is helpful to fur-
nish laborers with stick carriers, which may consist of a piece of heavy canvas, 6 or more feet long
and 2 to 3 feet wide, with handles on the ends, as in Fig. 1.5. This is laid on the ground, and sticks
and branches are piled across it. The handles may then be picked up and several armfuls carried
at a time with minimum effort.

TREE REMOVAL

Mechanized Logging. In some large-scale operations, logging may be almost completely mech-
anized, with felling, trimming, bucking, and transport (or piling and burning) done by highly spe-
cialized machines, some of which are described briefly in Chap. 21.
However, most clearing-for-excavation projects must rely on more standard machines and/or
hand labor.
Cutting or Uprooting. Big equipment can handle small trees in the same manner as brush. But big trees,
or any trees too large to be walked down by the equipment on the job, may require special kinds of work.
Pushing a tree over with a dozer or pulling it down with a cable follows the general methods
described for stumps later in this chapter. However, a machine can generally uproot a much larger
tree than a stump, because of greater leverage from a higher push or pull point and help from the
weight of the tree, which tends to tear out its roots as it leans.