]Bought the airplane last fall that I wanted. I have it on floats now, but have wheel skis for it. Only logical to have a place to keep it, so I am carving out a strip for winter use. It's behind the house on our 150 acres. Doesn't look like much yet, have to get an excavator in to clean it up, but it's coming. 1600' long, carved out of the only piece of flat ground we have.

Up North - No Joy on image - at least for this old Luddite

Wannabe see'n it.

upnorth180 wrote:Bought the airplane last fall that I wanted. I have it on floats now, but have wheel skis for it. Only logical to have a place to keep it, so I am carving out a strip for winter use. It's behind the house on our 150 acres. Doesn't look like much yet, have to get an excavator in to clean it up, but it's coming. 1600' long, carved out of the only piece of flat ground we have.

Fixed the link. Looking forward to your progress! I've always dreamed of a place I could build a strip on my own land.

I like the grapple you have on the blade! That's a good idea. Building a strip is a lot of work, but a lot of fun after its done.
Where are you building it?
David

Thanks CamTom12.

More pictures to follow......

Nice. I'm clearing my last 30 acres this summer. I've never got to use a skidder though.

Congratulations Upnorth, I think you'll find that having your own landing site at home is up there with owning your own airplane.

I've made a few bush and glider strips and one "main runway" hacked out of rock on our farm so, at risk of teaching Granny to suck eggs, could offer the following advice:

A BIG bulldozer (Cat D8 etc) with rock ripper will do in a few days what may take months with an excavator and dumper.
Drainage is high priority. Even a big ditch on each side of the runway is better than a swamp - helps maintain concentration too...
Unless you're on sand or gravel, avoid flat fields. I have neighbors with flat fields which are u/s for most of our winter.
Longitudinal slope up to 20% is fine. Slope is nature's brake on landing, free horsepower on take off and makes any airstrip more interesting - so you'll get more of the right kind of visitors.
Cross-fall helps drainage, so up to 5% is fine.
Obstacles (trees, fences, power lines) waste runway length.
Runway orientation will probably be decided by other factors, but it's easier to take off into the sun (with a clean windscreen) than to land into sun peering through a patina of dead bugs.

Take lots of photos and please post them here!

Thanks for the good info N-Jacko.

Unfortunately our land does not make this project easy. The 1600' I chiseled out is the only piece of flat ground I have, the rest is rock and timber. This airstrip will be for winter use only as the plane is on floats in the summer. Winter use eliminates a few problems, and creates some. Drainage isn't much of an issue as everything is frozen. Once the base is packed and frozen, it's is good to use, just occasional packing after big snowfalls is required. Because it's lower land, it would be very expensive to build it up high enough for year round use.

Headed out to work on clearing it this morning, will take pictures and post.

Lots of progress yesterday. Took out about 6 cords of timber. Have to lengthen another 500' then bring a hydro axe in to mulch the brush. It looks better in person than in the pictures, I should have stood on the machine to take the pictures, too much brush yet to see it well from ground level.








Lots of firewood for next year......



Not any easy place to carve out an airstrip.

This type of project is always fun, almost instant gratification. What is your plan to keep the saplings down in the summer? Will you seed?

Steve

Once the big stuff has been mulched, my Bobcat with a brush mower will keep it clear. I could do it now with the Bobcat, but it would take forever.

This will only be a winter use strip, so there won't be too much maintenance needed.

So when is the first winter fly in? We need more of them up here.

It will be a while, lots to do yet....

I rented a John Deere skid-steer (Bobcat) with a hydraulic driven bush hog mower for a project one time and it did work well for the smaller stuff. I have a Cat skid-steer on rubber tracks and had considered buying a bush hog for the front, but with all the granite we have here in the shield, I knew the rubber tracks would not hold up to running trails with it (it costs $6000 to replace them), so I ended up buying the largest model of these rough cut mowers http://kunzeng.com/acrease-rough-productpage.htm instead. I have pulled this mower behind my 4-wheeler for 8 years with just sharpening the blades on occasion, it is still going strong.

We took our flying club's PA12 fishing Saturday, every time I do that I get the fever to put the185 on skis, then I think about getting that heavy thing stuck in the slush, it would be nice to have an option to land on a strip when the lakes are bad...float season is coming.

Steve