Thought I'd throw in a few pictures to share. This was 1988 - 1989. The snow up there in the Stewart B.C. mountains was very deep and pretty heavy due to warm daytime temperatures. We were opening old mine access roads. The company had bought three HD-31's from the Revelstoke, B.C. tunnel project. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4_8q9QAu6U Two of them had rippers and the third a winch - which was always handy up there! They were, without doubt, the roughest walking dozers I ever operated, and we would always search out the snow banks to walk on! Very powerful machines though, and the Cummins snorted their way through heavy loads easily.
After spending two plus hours cleaning mud out an undercarriage of a D6R, I think snow would be alot nicer to clean out. Fire up a torch and stay nice and warm. Nice pics btw. Hopefully the heaters worked good.
Never any shortage of snow in Stewart. They had a pile of it again last winter.
Vannatta Bros has one it seems. http://www.vannattabros.com/dozer.html Is he on this board? I would be surprised if he is not.
That's a really great site with lots of pics and information! - http://www.vannattabros.com/dozer.html Thanks for providing it. Yes the 31's had good heaters and very spacious cabs for packing a decent lunch bag.
Did you by chance work with Bob McKay up there in Stewart? What a riot that guy is! I spent many hours in his shop tipping back the brews and listening to his stories, can't wait to go back and hear some more!
I would think those tracks would pack and be pretty hard on the front idler recoil spring without any cutouts in the pads to let the snow out, i have used the D8s,andD9s i owned pushing snow and i had to run the tracks a little loose to keep them from hammering. Great pictures!!! Don
Gotta tell yah the truth, I can't remember if I did or not, but the name sure sounds familiar. I do know that I've sure met a lot of really great people over the years in different camps and towns all over the country, and of course you do run into them again from time to time at other job sites.:drinkup
Never seemed to have a problem with any of them binding up in the snow. However, they sure were the roughest machines you could ever sit on when the snow melted and we had to bang around on the rocks! Also had a couple of Komatsu's, one was a brand new KOMATSU D65 and it whizzed around like a sports car. The other was a D475A if I recall correctly. (I spent a considerable amount of time on the D-9H up in the Yukon - loved the beasts! )
He runs the Petro Can in town now, older gentleman, absolutely great guy!
The HD31 & HD41 must have been the roughest-riding tractors of anything on the market, yet to this day I can think of no obvious reason why that should be when their undercarriage was a similar design to both Komatsu and Cat (pre-high drive) tractors. Maybe it was that being Italian they ran Berco undercarriage as standard. Having had experience of it as aftermarket on other brands of tractor nothing on this Earth would convince me to run that junk. The big problem with snow is packing. You really need the track shoes with the trapezoidal holes in them so that the snow gets pushed through the holes as it packs into the chains. Otherwise all the slack in your track disappears in the blink of an eye. You can see it in the photos, the tracks are like bow strings. God only knows what it did to the recoil springs.
Nige - " You can see it in the photos, the tracks are like bow strings. God only knows what it did to the recoil springs. " Yep, now that you point it out, you can see the buggers are tight! I never knew about such tracks with snow holes in them, but they would have been a good thing no doubt. I've never run a machine with that type of pad. Makes perfect sense though! Some self-acclaimed wise man up there explained that this dozer was so rough because it was incorrectly engineered so that the track segments always hit on a carrier roller, or some such thing, but I never did understand what he was talking about. I just went very slow in 1st gear and strapped down my lunch bucket! Cats were a lot smoother!
I do remember seeing a JD sales brochure on some of their smaller dozers where they pointed out that to get a smooth finish dozer in their smalleer lines the bottom rollers were spaced at different spacings so that they were never all on top of the pin/bush at the same time, which makes sense when u think about it. If they were spaced the same as the track pitch it could cause a rough ride, I have seen a similar thing in D6H LGPs once the rails wear a bit and they hollow out a bit from going round the idlers they give a somewhat rough ride in some conditions specially in 2nd gear I have found. Also read somewhere on here that the 31 was a scaled down 41, running 41 running gear etc but with a 6cyl instead of the V12 Cummins.Cheers RDG.