Prairie construction equipment

[BertB.]

Yeah he knows he's got more than he can handle and he has been selling some stuff. Once things slow down for us though I might work for Glen for the winter at least with his forestry operation cutting cordwood to sell for firewood....it will also be a nice break for myself from running the old Hitachi 160.

 

[BertB.]

Some photo's from my last tour of duty in Fort Mcmurray, AB I went up there one winter to work on an oil sands project. Since about the late '60's or '70's to nearly the early 2000's. Oil sands were mined with walking draglines and bucket wheel reclaimers. After the site was stripped of organics and dewatered a walking dragline would dig and windrow the oil sand, and a bucket wheel excavator or reclaimer (depending on who you ask) would scoop up the windrow and through its long conveyor it would transfer the oil sand to the extraction plant. Well most of those machines have long been sold off or scrapped but these ones were saved for this display....sadly you have to go to Fort Mcmurray to see it....................

 

[BertB.]

 

[Shovelhands]

Incredible pics Bert

 

[Grahams]

It wasn’t a criticism, so much as amazement that one guy would accumulate that amount of stuff. No way to play with that amount of toys!
I get what you are saying about lack of air conditioning. Must be a long day in the heat and flys though.
Graham

 

[BertB.]

Well he's got a couple employee's and over the years a lot of the main stay earthmoving outfits in the different regions of the Province have slowly petered out or 'modernized' so much of the equipment he hasn't paid big bucks for and he himself use to do a lot more of the big dirt jobs. Most of these jobs just don't happen much anymore the roads have been built and many of the subdivision jobs are done by big outfits with more modern equipment and big debts to go along with it. One fella I've known for years said the open canopy machines aren't bad for flies as the big radiator fan seems to suck them away and they never bothered me much when I was running the old excavators except for the wasps they are terrible and painful.

 

[BertB.]

Some pictures from my old days I was 23 at the time and was on top of the world for a while working for a company in Edmonton, AB called Sureway Construction. I worked pretty every day of the week for these guys but brought home some serious money doing so. This was the end of a large sanitary sewer trunkline project where some of our cuts were nearly 12 metres deep going through several hills! There were several spots along the route where they had to 'bore' beneath existing pipes and cables in the same manner as you see here but no where near as far as when they had to bore beneath this busy highway. I think the bore was something like 180 feet long. The machine at the time was referred to as an 'augering machine' now they call it a 'case bore' or something like that. Either way as you can see it worked just like Archimedes screw with the big difference being the Detroit diesel engine and 50 foot long track and a cutting head on the business end. After the boring machine broke through on the other end, the auger flights were pulled out of the casing and concrete pipe segments were then pushed through the casing in this case the pipe was about 1400mm or 1500mm I can't quite remember now. But the concrete pipe also had a plastic lining inside to help maintain the velocity of the s**t running through it was also joined up at each segment after installation with some sort of plastic fusing machine. Each steel casing with the auger flights in it weight around 18,000 or 19,000 pounds and I could barely hoist them with the 245 which weighed around 149,000lbs. I told them after doing that job and nearly having a casing swing at me they can do it with a proper crane next time.......so I never did any case bores after that.

 

[BertB.]

 

[BertB.]

I seriously wish I took more pictures of past jobs I did some were pretty neat like the deep sewer jobs and the 'triple ditch' jobs. As well some of the foundation jobs oh well I'm glad I at least got these ones. One particularly wet year I went to strip topsoil for somebody building a new house out of pre-cast concrete walls they needed a hard standing for setting up a crane and so they weren't in the mud all the time. So I was sent out with a 16,000hour Cat 320L excavator with a pretty beat up tilt ditcher so I stripped topsoil over a wide area and piled it up exposing the clay beneath. The builder had a brand new Thomas skid-steer with over the tire tracks that he was going to pad out some 6" minus crushed limestone with. The skid-steer could do the job but not without difficulty so at some point his dad brought his restored International TD-6 out and started padding out the crushed rock with no problem. Since then I've always wanted to get one for myself but it hasn't been easy to find one for a decent price.

 

[BertB.]

Couple years ago we got a call from our government run electrical utility to mulch 18km of brush along a power line in cottage country. We were suppose to get the whole job and it was going to take a whole month to do. In the end they cut it down by hiring in another contractor to do half the job. In the end when we had our tailgate meeting at the beginning of the job we had already surveyed the project and were able to worm our way out of working on the most difficult terrain as this area is Canadian Shield which consists of very very rocky granite outcroppings that can be very difficult to climb up or down on steel tracks actually good terrain for a four wheel drive spider excavator. Some places though were pretty much peat bog so having the wide tracks proved to be valuable throughout the job.

 

[fred]

bet there was loads of Sasquatch watching you dig up their home!

Great pics.

 

[TiltyShaun]

Thank you for all the photos. Amazing to see the extraction kit. Just shows what great lengths we go to in pursuit of black sticky stuff!!

 

[BertB.]

Thank you for all the photos. Amazing to see the extraction kit. Just shows what great lengths we go to in pursuit of black sticky stuff!!

Oh yeah no problem, just sucks that they don't allow photos on the actual mine site the equipment there is amazing and some of it is quite specialised.

 

[BertB.]

Some more brush cutting or mulching pictures, the weather wasn't particularly cold but instead it couldn't figure out if it wanted to snow or rain. Colder weather would of been nicer to freeze up the bogs and make the brush more brittle and easier to mulch. Some places I would just cut the trees at the bottom so they would be layed out flat on the ground to provide some extra support in the soft ground. The flail on the 210 sure was a nice attachment for working close to the road as it didn't throw debris like the brush cutter and while the brush cutter would do just about everything the flail would, you didn't really want to work close to the road or any structures. But both attachments are very easy to maintain and well built and parts are only ever a few hours away. The other crew were using brush cutters but with blades instead of a mulching disc the quality of the work they did was pretty poor and there was no safety as the road they were working next to was littered with sticks and wood shrapnel. Our brushcutter came with the swinging type blades but after a quick trial the guys quickly ordered the mulching disc which has worked quite well despite the distances the shrapnel can fly. Hopefully some day in the future we can get a fixed tooth mulcher for one of the machines.

 

[BertB.]

The last photo is a 52" brush cutter that the other guys had been using its got a lot more hours on it than ours but you can see the swinging blades on it which are better in thick grasses and fine brush in the summer when everything is far more bendy. About a week in to the job the bosses wife was involved in a car accident whilst returning from a shopping trip in the U.S. and had to have several surgeries so I ran the job for the most part till it was completed with a local operator running the Hitachi with the brushcutter head while I ran the 210 with the flail. Thankfully I didn't have any DEF problems with the Kobelco as its been a bit of a lemon in that regard. We did manage to have at least one hot lunch whilst working out there.

 

[BertB.]

Some pictures from before I started with C.T. Construction. We had been called out to assist a crew trying to install streetlighting cables on a nearly completed 4 lane divided highway. They were going to hire in a cable plow but none were available so they brought their nearly new Vermeer chain trencher. A very powerful machine that had a tilt feature for trenching on slopes the only thing it didn't do was backfill its own trenches. The levelling feature worked most of the time but some of the road slopes were pretty steep and quite wet from a recent rain so it slid down and I had to try and drag it perpendicular to the slope so it could climb and out of the way. That was horrendously heavy as I was running a 16 tonne Deere John excavator but eventually I got it swung around and took over trenching till we got on some more level ground. Then I backfilled and restored everything to better than new with the tilt bucket. I did have to trench across a box culvert which was a little weird but got it done with no problems.

 

[BertB.]

The belt on the trencher can be switched to convey to the left or to the right. And I think there is a version with a trenching wheel studded with tungsten carbide teeth for rockyish soils but I don't know if there is a bucket wheel version such as used on pipeline jobs.

 

[BertB.]

One of our specialties ditching and drainage work so we put a few culverts in, place a few stones.

 

[BertB.]

One year we did something like 4 or 5 miles of ditching and all at the last minute kinda thing because winter was rapidly approaching and it was a really wet year just before we started on the last ditch we had a 2" rain fall so it was more like dredging than ditching and the powers that be always seem to have us starting from the middle and ending in the middle. Everything is surveyed before we arrive and we use trimble lasers, one Leica laser receiver, one Spectra receiver, and now we have a new trimble receiver and laser as we have a third machine on rent with all the work we have this year.

 

[Grahams]

Good news you have plenty of work on.
Those boom mounted laser receivers look very handy.
Graham