This little dragline requires more than a few hours to get the ' left-brain / right-brain ' sequences going properly in order to remember what lever to push/pull to swing/dig and which foot brake to hold the pull/lift lines at thrr same time.
Is that a 19RB or a 22.?
Its the RB22 . We bought it back in 2002 during the big 2001 - 2007 drought here in Australia to clean out silted up dams on the property. It chugs along all day on very little diesel use and is surprising how much mud it can shift in a day with that little 1 yrd bucket. ( 30 - 60 seconds / load ). Its handy at this work because you can carry out the work with water still in the dam. Clean out the dry section, drain the water into that hole then clean out the rest of the dam area. ( handy in drought when you cant afford to waste the water ) We use a dozer to push the piles of mud out over the bank if we cant reach with the boom.
Not an "RB22" - it's a 22RB (Ruston Bucyrus, aka Rusty Pie-Crust) So it will be a UK-built machine with most likely a Ruston 6YDA diesel engine. I ran a long-lever one on crane rig in the late 70's/early 80's on a dam construction job. A great tool. The Ruston Bucyrus quarry stuff we had in the 60's was bigger. 38RB's and 54RB's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruston-Bucyrus
I used to work for a firm that had a fleet of them, mainly used for digging shafts for tunneling projects. Worked on both the manual controls (which we called Handraulic) and the later air ones. They were "interesting" things to repair and, operating wise, easy to get yourself into trouble if you didn't know what you were doing.
Nice machine! Mine has a 318 Cat for power. Clam all day on 8 or 10 gallons of fuel.
22RB......right you are. She has sat here for years now not doing a lot. But fires up every time we need it. It was also great as a crane lifting welded up frames into place when we rebuilt our machinery shed. ( old one burned down )
" Easy to get yourself in trouble " not wrong there.... my brother was having a go at it not long after we first got it. He was cleaning mud from a dam and was winding the bucket right in, then letting it swing out as far as it would go toward the middle of the dam to reach mud. On one of these ' bucket casts ' he miss-timed the winch foot-brake & let the winch cable overrun on the winchdrum and the cable coiled around part of the body of the machine between the winch and his chair. He didnt realize this and started pulling the bucket back in.......when the slack was taken up on the winch drum, the winch just kept slowly winding the cable in and snapped the cable like a string of spaghetti where it was looped over the machine body right beside the drivers chair. He was lucky it didnt get round his leg.
Used to be a big one around here mining coal. I think they called it the Maid Marion?