Yair . . . stumbled upon this . . . . http://bangshift.com/blog/bulldozers-and-steel-balls-bangshift-greatness-circa-1950.html May be of interest to some. Cheers.
That there is a good read. Nice find Scrub!
Nice find Scrub Puller. Did you use anything like that when you were doing land clearing. I know you used big chains.
Yair . . . The concept of using wire rope on winches attached to a hi-ball is new to me and I can see in certain situations it would be very effective. We used wire rope at times but it tended to climb too high . . . a situation prevented by the ball. Having rope behind the tractor would somewhat limit the manoeuvrability of individual machines but man, if you could get one track behind a decent tree you could do some very serious sucking with the 110 series not working very hard at all. Cheers.
That's a great find. I thought something similar was still going in the Amazon these days.
The trees they were ripping out and burning would be good saw logs today.
I was told by a friend of mine that in the '60's when Atomic Energy of Canada Limited commissioned construction of the Whiteshell Labratories in Pinawa, Manitoba, Canada that the clearing contractor on that job did the same thing with a pair of D8's pulling a cable 'with balls' so despite a lack of internet in those days word got around. lol Nice story though, now a days if you go and clear land and burn your brush piles people start freaking out and call the Fire Department about two years ago we had that happen we already had ample snow on the ground and a land owner was burning some small piles of brush and somebody called 911 and we got out there and started laughing....the piles were almost gone by morning when I drove to work. lol
I have read quite a bit about these balls over the last number of years. In addition to helping hold the cable down on a harder pull it also raised the cable up off the ground adding leverage to pull the bigger stuff over. Scrub Puller, I might be mind slipping but it seems to me that on the ACMOC site I seen some pictures or a link to a U-Tube remake of a old video showing the same setup being used in Australia somewhere pulled by Cats.
Yair . . . old-iron-habit Could well be mate but I am unaware of any outfits that pulled with winches. In the early days balls were fairly common but as the tractors got bigger they became redundant. They held the back of the chain down but, with a bit of manoeuvring it was also possible to position the high end of the axle against a tree and get some extra height. This is where that winch set up would be handy, you could adjust the position of the ball with out the tractor moving. We tried lots of different methods but pulling with three tractors on the one chain was (and is) far and away the most productive way to take down timber. Cheers.