Showerthought: The difference in how we handle grade stakes now versus ten years ago

I was clearing a lot in Boise last week and realized we barely touch wooden stakes anymore. Ten years back, a site was a forest of them, and you'd spend the first hour just checking them all. Now, with the GPS rovers on the dozers and excavators, the foreman just uploads the design file. The change came from the price drop on that tech, I think. It's faster, but I kinda miss the old way of lining things up by eye. Anyone else feel like they're just following a screen most days?

3 comments

3 Comments

hannahcraig7h ago

Yeah, we're all just button pushers now. My favorite is watching the new kid stare at the screen like it's giving him life advice while he's about to scrape the side of a fuel tank. The tech is great until it glitches and you've built a slope in the wrong zip code. Guess we traded knowing the job for knowing how to reboot a tablet.

adams228h ago

Heard a story from a buddy who runs a grading crew. They were using the new GPS on a big pad site, everything going smooth off the screen. Then the system had a hiccup, just a tiny one, but the dozer was off by like two feet before anyone caught it. They had to stop and bring in a guy with a transit to double check the whole corner. Makes you wonder if we trust the screen too much sometimes. That old way of checking stakes kept you in touch with the dirt.

derekhunt7h ago

My old foreman used to say GPS stands for "gonna piss someone off." We had a skid steer operator follow the screen right into a drainage trench that wasn't on the digital map yet. Cost us half a day to winch it out.