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After all my years of operating heavy equipment and anything else that I needed, I got to drive a dozer. Nice new John Deere. Thing is nicer than my car.

I had a blast (no pun...) operating my granddad's bulldozer when I was a kid. Of course, my uncle Jimmy was behind me making sure I didn't pull the wrong level or anything, but I actually got to push stuff around and once lifted up a big chunk of concrete.

But honestly, I preferred the backhoe loader, especially the backhoe itself, kind of got pretty good with it. Dream wish is to own a little mini backhoe and just dig up holes and refill them at our other property all day for not good reason at all.

QillerDaemon wrote: ↑Sat Mar 28, 2026 7:04 pm I had a blast (no pun...) operating my granddad's bulldozer when I was a kid. Of course, my uncle Jimmy was behind me making sure I didn't pull the wrong level or anything, but I actually got to push stuff around and once lifted up a big chunk of concrete.

But honestly, I preferred the backhoe loader, especially the backhoe itself, kind of got pretty good with it. Dream wish is to own a little mini backhoe and just dig up holes and refill them at our other property all day for not good reason at all.

Good to have goals and dreams

Who wrote: ↑Sat Mar 28, 2026 7:31 pm Good to have goals and dreams

A guy's got to have some decent hobby for his retirement years...

Blast wrote: ↑Sat Mar 28, 2026 3:33 pm After all my years of operating heavy equipment and anything else that I needed, I got to drive a dozer. Nice new John Deere. Thing is nicer than my car.

I ran a dozer, and other equipment, in my mid teens working with a buddy for his dad for several summers.

The dozer was an old D6 Cat that we were using to pull a harrow bed and a set of disks over some wheat/barley fields to turn the soil.

That dozer was and old fucking beast. To start it, there was a separate/connected gas motor, around 5hp. It had the old school "wrap the rope around the pully and give it hell" starter. Once we got that thing running and warmed up there was this lever that we had to pull up to engage it's drive with the Cats motor to get that diesel spinning and running. There was no clutch or geared timing to engage that shit, just yank it up and hang on until that Cat motor fired up. My shoulder still hurts from that crap.

when I first got out of college I worked for a company that did really large heavy/highway projects. During my first year they sent me around to various jobs just to see how things are done. One of those stops was a huge job building a runway. They were still in the dirt work stage. They had a Cat D-10 dozer on the job and I spent one day in the cab with the guy operating it. For some reason I just thought of this the other day and kind of relived the memories of it in my mind. It was kind of terrifying. The thing was monstorously big and felt very unstable. Mostly because the operator was pushing up huge sandstone boulders and piling them and trying to break them down by walking over them. Plus the cab wasn't built for two so I was sort of sitting on a side console by the driver. The scale of things was what I remember most about that day. You really realized how big things had to be to move other big things in order to build stuff. The operator was also a huge guy. The kind of guy that could only wear overalls because that's about all he could find to fit. like a big denim wrap with shoulder straps. He climbed up into this monster in the morning with his lunch kit and didn't get out of the seat until he went home. I probably spent more time thinking about what his life must be like, which might have been a lot of the point.