[Timber Lane]

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.

Will the power auger do the job?

[dan deutekom]

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.

[Squizzy Taylor]

What Dan said

[FungusMudGrub]

Originally Posted by Timber Lane

The guys who work for me there want to hand dig the holes,

Words fail me..............I'm astonished that there are people who want to dig post holes through rock, and extremely puzzled as to why!