21st June 2006, 10:10 AM
Vulpes,
Afraid I have to agree with Merc on this one regarding developer supplied machines. I don't think you can put the blame only on the supervising Arch - as soon as the bucket of the machine touches the ground only the driver has control, the very nature of stripping means that it is very easy to dip or raise the bucket during the strip. If you don't have a driver that you can trust then you at best end up with a choppy topsoil covered strip which makes cleaning up sooooo much more difficult, at worst you get islands of arch surviving amoungst craters. In my experience a reaonably large percentage of developer supplied drivers & machines just cant do the job - whither this is down to attitude or ability os open to debate. I personally think that often operators dont have a delicate enough touch - I have sent several off of jobs as they could just not do it.
This said I have worked with some really good drivers supplied by the developer, but this is usually where the developer is nominally interested.
Afraid I have to agree with Merc on this one regarding developer supplied machines. I don't think you can put the blame only on the supervising Arch - as soon as the bucket of the machine touches the ground only the driver has control, the very nature of stripping means that it is very easy to dip or raise the bucket during the strip. If you don't have a driver that you can trust then you at best end up with a choppy topsoil covered strip which makes cleaning up sooooo much more difficult, at worst you get islands of arch surviving amoungst craters. In my experience a reaonably large percentage of developer supplied drivers & machines just cant do the job - whither this is down to attitude or ability os open to debate. I personally think that often operators dont have a delicate enough touch - I have sent several off of jobs as they could just not do it.
This said I have worked with some really good drivers supplied by the developer, but this is usually where the developer is nominally interested.