Owen Duffy wrote:
"Hal Rosser" wrote in
:

I have also heard of buying a new chain and bar for your chainsaw,
then using the OLD one to cut a path through the yard.

In this part of the world, you can rent a Ditch-Witch or Trench-Wench which
use a similar concept, but the chain carries cutters designed for earth and
rocks rather than one designed for wet timber.

Ditch-Witchs and Trench-Wenchs aren't very good for cutting trees, nor are
chainsaws very good for digging trenches.

On the other hand, there's a big difference between a "slit into which a
cable/small conduit can be stuffed" and a 4" wide trench with a ridge of
dirt along side.

Mind you, I am a HUGE fan of the gas powered trencher, but it's a pretty
invasive approach.

You also have to really contemplate "shovel and back" vs trencher. I
had a 100 ft or so gas line installed a year ago, and the plumber just
got the shovel out and trenched it by hand in a couple of hours. That's
comparable to the time I spent going down to the rental yard, getting
the trencher, bringing it home, unloading it off the trailer, spending
30 minutes trenching for the irrigation lines, then returning it.

And I'm not sure my back was any better off than the plumber's at the
end of the day.

Granted, the trencher is nice in dense, rock filled clay, where a
"digging bar" is part of the required tool complement. The plumber had
the advantage of digging where I had previously dug some years before.

You don't have to invent a new tool for this application, plumbers and
electricians have been inserting narrow conduits / pipes in earth trenches
for decades using these types of machines.

There's also a sort of walk behind motorized plow for doing this sort of
thing. I saw one at the rental yard a few years ago. It has a sturdy
steel blade that has a sort of overall V shape, and fairly large tires
driven by a geared down gasoline motor and a bunch of ballast. I think
the advantage of this is that you can drive it across a lawn to lay a
cable or pipe and not have to do a bunch of resodding after you are done.

In any case, as the poster comments, this is a pretty standard overall
task, and there's lots of ways to do it.

An alternative to renting a machine may be to find a plumber who
specialiese in in-ground sprinkler systems... and get a quote for him to
dig your trenches.

Owen