Thursday-
We started out trying to get a john deere tractor pulled out because it needed to go to the shop for a recall. While positioning the 580 backhoe, it sank like a rock. We tried to dig it self out but it kept getting worse.

We resorted to using an 80's ford f250 with a 300 to pull the tractor out, and It pulled it without a problem.






Friday-
A dozer is dropped off early in the morning, and we set off to pull the 580 out. We have about 150ft of cable, chain and straps. We figure the dozer will be able to pull it. After trying from many different angles and even getting a good running start, i am hardly budging the thing. I wish i had got video of me doing it. we had some lifting straps and 1 huge ****** strap. Id get a some slack and floor the dozier and it wouldn't budge it and were talking about a good sized 20,000lbs dozer. We ended up hooking the strap to the arm on the backhoe and using the dozer as an anchor, but it sat to long and sank itself. The hand that was helping said that when i was moving the dozer you could feel the earth sinking around it.







I have better pics of the both the 580 and dozer stuck, and ill post them later.

After i had left, my dad showed up with a trackhoe and pulled them both out without any problems.

It was defiantly interesting, and probably the worst iv ever seen anything stuck.

 

 

good god! looks like you need one of those tank wreckers

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...icle_in_pm.jpg

 

Now that is stuck. Hope your not in the part of Texas that getting snow tonight because it looks like a long dry spell would do you some good.
-John

 

Thats a lot of stuck. I've seen some pretty bad stuff too, logging equipment goes down easy in mud.

I sunk an excavator in a swamp and it was a pain in the *** to recover. Had to get the skidder to anchor to and try to pull out slowly. And later that excavator got sunk in some mud at my house while building a quad track. Needless to say, the engine gave up on life and we had to wait until summer to get it out. We changed the engine where it was. I had to dig a tunnel under the excavator though lol. To give you an idea of how bad it was, the tracks were under ground, and you could step on the top from the ground.

Skidders like to sink too, but they're not as bad to get out. Excavators can usually pull em out pretty easily.

Thats some pretty good mud though.
Just don't leave dozers in area's it can sink. I remember a few years back driving down the road I saw a dozers blade sitting straight up in the air, the rear of it started sinking and just kept going lol.

 

I live in northeast rock country .. always hated the fact that you can't put a shovel more than 6" in without hitting some big rocks .. but I guess it is better than having things dig their own holes where you don't want them to ..

 

Loved the pictures!!!

 

Thanks for sharing those pics. That was pretty wild.

 

Glad ya'll liked the pictures. I wish i had been there to get pictures of the excavator pulling them both out. I was told it just plowed through the ground for another 100ft before getting to solid ground.

We considered flagging down a BIG oil field winch truck and paying him to pull it out. But we never had the chance.

This is exactly the reason why its not supposed to rain this much in Texas, the property is just southeast of Wichita Falls near bowie and their is probably a good couple inches of snow sitting on the ground right now. Right now you can hardly drive a 4x4 on the property, we've been using 4wheelers and rangers.

 

Oh, you mean one of them gin-pole trucks with winches so big they lift the front end of the truck up in the air if the load is too heavy? I've been thinking of getting a set of them A-frames for my road tractor, it already has the winch and frame and axles to handle that kinda work, would be nice if we can use the ginpoles for lifting 4x4 trucks and farm equipment that's sunken into the mud...

 

Springtime here ends up with a lot of vehicles drowning in mud, and I've had to pull some of them out. Including a 4-door Dodge Neon that had its unibody sinking in the front.

 

Worst stuck I've ever seen was a Cat D-11R dozer. All we could see was the the rollcage on top of the cab and a portion of the ripper. They pulled it out with another 11R and a 575A Komatsu superdozer. That thing is huge.

 

Did ya'll get a lot of snow/sleet? We got a little bit here in Azle

 

I dont know how much they got up there, Our house is in ft worth and we got 1/2in here. Id think they got a little more then that.

We have an older Chevy medium duty truck with a flat bed and i wouldn't be surprised if it got a big winch and some gen polls after all this. Although i dont know if it would have helped in this situation.

Luckily the company that my father manages and i work for, actually owns the land, and they let us hunt and use it whenever we want, but its not a big deal to get much bigger and badder equipment out there to pull stuff out if need be. Talk about company perks.

 

If that Chev has just a single rear axle she'd sink right away if you tried to lift the dozer up - if you gonna run in that stuff you need lots of wheels to distribute the load as even as possible. For instance my truck has a super-singles front axle, dual-wheels lift axle, the tandems are permanently coupled together (can't shut the leading axle off like many newer trucks can) and there are locking differentials in both axles - this ancient thing was built to pull stupid heavy loads on flatbed trailers and then pull said trailers through all sorts of bad ground surface, she's pretty much an oilfield truck with a sleeper and a 5th wheel hitch, and even so I've managed to get her stuck in a mud field on the farm where she lives most of the year, a field that looked much like that mess you got on your hands... Kudos for your company perks tho, as they seem to negate the need of actually owning such equipment