With my father facing retirement we needed to consider the ongoing costs of maintaining and running the truck. Before the inevitable parting we decided to make full use it and increase our stockpile of stone to ensure that we had enough to see my needs out.
A friend of mine owning a farming property on the southern side of Mt Porndon, near Stonyford over 100km away to our west, offered to us any stone that would be suitable for our purpose. On an initial inspection of the property the prospects were not looking real good, most of the more accessible stone was too brittle, however we did manage to locate some good, mostly submerged rocks and decided that it would be feasible to transport the loader down and dig them out. November of 2007 saw us on site, picking our way around the property.
The process of raising the rocks out of the ground proved to be very tough work with many shock loads taking their toll on the loader. The bottom of the bucket, suffering from the result of many years of digging salty sand and residing near the coast, virtually disintegrated after a couple of loads. Daylight can be seen through the many holes in the bucket in the above picture, shortly before it's demise.
After another couple of weeks of my spare time gone, we had the bucket rebuilt, ready to take back down to Stonyford and resume the operation. We removed a total of five loads of stone and decided to call it quits from this location as the remaining good rock was proving too hard to extract.
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