kim373•2mo ago

That trench digging shortcut I keep seeing fail on chain link jobs

I drive by at least 3 fence sites a week where guys try to save time digging post holes by angling the auger instead of clearing rocks first. I saw it happen twice last month on a job in Akron where a guy snapped a $120 auger bit on a buried chunk of limestone. The foreman told him "you clear the path, not force the machine." It ends up taking longer because you gotta replace the bit and still dig the hole right. Why do people keep skipping the basic rock removal step when it costs more in the long run? Has anyone else seen this shortcut backfire on a site?

3 comments

3 Comments

piper_reed2mo ago

Gotta disagree here. I've been on enough chain link jobs where pausing to clear every rock actually kills the whole day's rhythm, especially when you're dealing with that rocky Ohio clay. Sure, snapping a bit is a pain (and yeah, it happened to me once on a job near Medina), but I've found that if you know your ground and use a bit with replaceable teeth, you can power through small stuff faster than stopping to dig it out by hand every five minutes. The article's 40% labor time stat feels cherry-picked to me, like it's assuming nobody knows what they're doing. Sometimes the shortcut works fine if you're smart about it and don't treat the auger like a bulldozer.

terry_lewis212mo ago

I was just reading an article about this in a construction trade magazine my buddy left at the shop. They did a study and found that skipping the rock removal step adds like 40% more labor time on average across a whole fence job because of broken bits and having to redo holes. I saw a crew in Canton try this on a chain link job and the auger kicked back so hard it threw the operator off balance. He came down on a piece of rebar sticking out of the ground and tore his pants. The foreman was screaming about how now they gotta file a safety report too. It's just dumb because the time you "save" gets eaten up by repair work and equipment downtime.

benc531mo ago

That stat about 40% more labor time from the magazine study really sticks out to me, Terry. But @piper_reed made a decent point about knowing your ground and using good bits. So here's my question: in that study or from what you saw in Canton, were they using the right auger for the soil type, or were they just running a standard bit through rocky clay and hoping for the best? I figure there's a big difference between hitting a few loose rocks and fighting a buried ledge or old concrete footer. Seems like the real problem isn't skipping the rock removal, its knowing when you can get away with it and when you're asking for a broken bit and a safety meeting.