I need to set eight 6"x6" posts at my vacation home property in the mountains of West Virginia. I have a 2005 New Holland LS 170 skid steer. I can rent an auger attachment locally to help dig the holes.
The ground is a mix of rock and clay they call "chert". I have scraped out hillsides with my skid steer bucket, so I know the rock will flake out eventually. My question: Will the auger get me down 40" into the rock or am I wasting my time? The guys who work for me there want to hand dig the holes, but I can't imagine that they would be able to do it by hand with picks, bars, and shovels without spending a half day on each hole.
My experience with augers says that it won't. Every time the auger hits a stone it will stop digging and worse yet it sets that stone into the clay so firmly that it is next to impossible to pick it out. It makes the auger virtually useless. I have bent the cutting edge of augers trying to get through this stuff. I have yet to find an easy way to dig a post hole in this type of soil/rock. I would suspect a vacuum excavator truck would make easy work of it.
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Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways - Beer in one hand - Nacho's in the other - body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming : Woo Hoo, what a ride!
Go 40" into the rock?.........solid rock?.......can only think of drilling some how.
If it's a clay rock mixture as you say....and I am envisioning....I've seen and done post holes by hand. Post hole digger and a straight bar........poking and prodding the rocks to be removed from the hole......we've dug the surface hole over sized.....so that we can work the post hole digger further down to the target depth.
After much debate, we are leaning toward using an electric jack hammer to bust through the rock. We can bring along a generator and a local guy is making us a 24" extension bit so that once we are down a foot or so we can add the bit and get our 40" depth. Since we are going through a hilly wooded area, this option seems to have less limitations than trying to get our skid steer into tight places.
I drilled over 3000 holes for vineyards in Southern California using an auger with diamonds studded teeth on a Bobcat S250. The soil conditions there are decomposed granite and some not so decomposed. The auger worked great unless there was a sizable stone in the way. Then, digging bars, pick axes and shovels
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