Hey guys. Been running equipment for a while and almost hurt myself. Here is my quick story if you have one post it up. Not really wanting to make this a doom and glum post so ... Job: Loading logs and brush into dump truck. Equipment: F700, Case 75xt open cab, heavy gapple Terrain: slight slope towards truck Loading logs and brush into back of dump. Everything going fine. Truck gets mostly full. I have one 3" sappling hanging over the side of the truck i am loading. Got a little heavy on my load, as the next load is going up the machine tips forward and catches the small tree and causes it to stick straight toward my cab. It almost impelled me. The rear end of the machine is up in the air resting on the side of the dump. Quick thinking and luck pulled through. The lesson i learned is always try to load on flat areas and watch out for danger that is not immediately apparent but is lurking close by. Trees whipping back by the compounding forces of leverage and weight can get you quick.
I always like these discussions, because its better to learn form somebody else's mistakes than to try to make them all yourself. Here are a couple more. My own closest call was in backfilling a sewer, trying to reach past the cleanout pipe that was sticking up above grade. I had the bucket full of gravel, holding it fairly high, and the bank gave out a little. I ended up looking at that 4" plastic pipe sticking into the cab, about a foot from my nose. Fortunately, it was a tracked machine, and simply dumping the load and backing up gently got me out of there, but it happened all of a sudden, and could've been very ugly. We had another guy on the job, who had a bad habit of carelessness. Two stories about him. One, he was filling a crawl space with stone for under the concrete floor, and he was in too big of a hurry. Approached the wall with the bucket high, on ground that sloped towards the wall of the house. Stopped too quickly, or maybe even jerked backwards a little, and ended up with the machine sitting vertical, bucket in the hole, and the opening of the cab resting on the top of the wall. Later, the same guy was in the process of swapping the pallet forks for the bucket, and didn't get it quite right. Instead of stopping and getting out of the seat to make it right, he slid his butt down in the seat, never even idling the engine down, and attempted to kick the lever on the attachment mount into place with his foot. Somehow, he missed, bumped the controls, and the arms came down just far enough for the crossmember to give him a nasty bruise on his leg. A few inches more, and he'd have crushed it. The company should've bought part of that, because the safety switch on the seat belt was faulty, and guys would operate it without wearing the seatbelt.
If you're loading a truck you want good terrain, manageable loads, luck, or some combination therein. 2:20 shows an example of those three things running out, although it would have been worse if the cab would have smacked the trailer. The biggest problem is getting an over heaping bucket and a radial lift. My current loader is a vertical lift and is a bit less tippy. http://youtu.be/XBQDdnOXsjs
I think I have told this story on HEF before but I'll tell it again. It has just as much to do with not paying attention as it does to skids. Back in the late 90's I was grading the front parking lot for the first building I built to house the office and shop. I needed to swap the bucket to the forks to move a few pallets of materials, in order to prep the rest of the parking lot for the concrete guys that were coming the next morning. This was an 853 Bobcat without the fancy hyd Bobtach, they weren't available at the time. This was also the old box/tube style quick tach with the rubber flaps on top that never really kept any debris from getting in, clogging up the pins - remember those? Anyway the pins were froze up with dirt and crap like normal so I lifted the bucket off the ground, with the teeth pointing straight down so I could clean them out. Cleaned the first one out and took the cheater bar to it to open the lever. Then went to the second one and cleaned it out. Put the cheater bar on the second lever and gave it a pull - yep I didn't close the first one.. As gravity would have it, the second the other pin was moved the bucket swung out a little and straight down in a terrifying flash. Luckily for me all I have to show for this amazing act of stupidity, is a scar a few inches below the knee that stops a few inches above my foot - by the grace of God, my foot was positioned between the teeth and the only thing that got me was the cutting edge. I was also wearing cowboy style work boots which produced an accordion effect and allowed me to jump back as the bucket was falling. My poor old plumber must have seen it happen, as he ran out of the building - white as a ghost - to see if I still had my foot..
I'll share a couple. Last summer I had a stuck quick attach on my tractor...stuck in the open position. I had it up at face height with a cheater bar over the handle. I was pulling down hard on the bar with one hand while jimmying the pin with the other. When it let loose the bar slipped off and the back of my hand struck the corner of the other quick attach plate, gashing it down between the little bones and other goodies that you're not supposed to see. I still have problems with the thumb on that hand. If I had my gloved on the injury probably wouldn't have been so bad. They were sitting on the ground at my feet. A few years ago I was spreading some recycled asphalt for a customer. He said he had a friend with a rental place and would provide a vibratory roller. It turns out that his friend's rental yard was one of those places that buys out old, used up equipment from other rental yards. The roller he brought didn't have ROPS and had a big problem with the steering. Three turns one way...wait for a second or two and it would turn too far. Same thing the other way. I was going through a divorce at the time and got a text from my attorney just as I was approaching the culvert area. I got too close to the edge and over she went. Luckily, it was in slow motion and I had time to jump clear. Not paying attention to what I was doing could've resulted in some pretty nasty consequences.
I watched one of my guys damn near kill himself this week. Scared the living crap out of all of us. It happens all the time. You get fussing with moving the tractor and forget you have your hand on the lever. Loader goes up up up, until the load comes over the top and down at you. Steel beam just missed his head. Holy crap is freaks me out just thinking about. I was waiving my arms and running toward him as it happened but I didn't get his attention. I stopped work, rounded up the whole crew, and let everyone have a look at how bad things can happen. Unfortunately, you can't force people to think and be careful. I do believe that if you spend a lot of time hearing about the accidents of others, it keeps you on your toes.
This had me shook for a while I was loading thinck brush and vines in a dumpster. A previous contrsctor had just rammed everything into a huge ball and i dont have a grapple so the only way i could get manageable pieces was with the forks. I would drive in and rip a chunk up, then drive it over and dump it. One load i lift and see this nasty snapped battering ram come swinging at my face. I froze as it smashed into the lap bar, peeling the foam back and bending it. Could have easily killed me
Great examples. One thing to note is that there is no seat switch or seatbelt switch in the Bobcats. You can literally stand in the bucket and move the levers and the machine will move.
I was running a 5130 cat shovel loading dirt onto a mixture of 777's, 789's, and 190 Euclids. Walked up to the dig face to start my next pass and noticed a root ball sitting on the edge. I was planning on as soon as I could reach it, pulling it down to where I could work with it at ground level. Right as I got to the dig face, I guess the vibrations of the machine caused the root ball, with about 15' of tree still attached to fall off the top of the dirt. When it hit the ground it slammed over , and thru the windshield. I saw it moving and started swinging to my right, the top of the tree laid right down the walkway beside me. No permanent damage to me, but I do shave my head. All the flying glass nicked me up pretty good and I was apparently a pretty scary sight. New policy is if there are trees or brush, it gets pushed down on the floor and we load it from there.
I had loaned my Cat 287 to a friend once and he was using it to install a fence at his ranch. He had a helper, who was also a former employee, assisting with the fence. Lets just say there are many good reasons the helper was a FORMER employee. He was doing the labor work, and had been instructed to wait until the owner, my friend, was back to run the machine. He was being overly helpful by using the skid to stretch the fence. This led to him getting out of the machine to tie off the fence while the arms were a few feet up in the air. He tied off the fence, and got back in, sat in the seat, and left his legs sticking out the front Then he backed away and lowered the boom on his own legs. Fortunately he did it slowly and stopped before he was seriously injured. Please sit in the machine properly before operating, and when told to stay off of something, listen.
A five year old boy was killed here in mn this spring. The boom was left up a little on the skidsteer and he evidently tried to get in by crawling between the boom and the frame. They think he grabbed a lever or pedal for handhold and dropped the boom on him. The machine was reportedly not running at the time and must not have had any lockout solenoids on the valves unless they had been bypassed.
I had a nasty incident with a bobcat a good long time ago... I was digging rocks out of a hillside, and hauling it about half a mile to a neighbour's house. He forgot to tell me that they had just pulled a stump out of a spot just in front of where the rock was going, and having rained for about a week on end the spot was a total mud hole. The hole looked the same as the solid ground all around it, it was the perfect tank trap, the bobcat was instantly up to the top of the tires in the hole. We drug it outta there with my buddy's cat and I got back to work a little worked up about how the day had turned out so far... I got back to the gravel bank and took a good scoop out when suddenly a large boulder came bouncing down the bank, rolled over the now loaded bucket and joined me in the cab... It pinned my right leg back against the seat and downward so that my heel was pushing down on the back of the tilt pedal. The bucket of course did what it was designed to do when one presses on the heel of the tilt pedal. It rolled back and pushed the rock even tighter against my leg. Thankfully it ran out of travel almost right away. I lowered the arms all the way down (my left leg was thankfully not pinned), and once the bucket was lowered down I was able to wrestle the rock out of the cab. I thought "Whew that could've been bad", carried on and hauled probably a dozen or more buckets of rock to the neighbour's house. The throbbing pain in my knee was bearable so I thought nothing of it. Until I went to get out of the machine... That's when I realized I couldn't put any weight on it whatsoever, and walking was out of the question. I drove home and hobbled my way inside to where my dad greeted me with his usual "understanding" that he had whenever I hurt myself somehow. I couldn't walk for a few days and was limping for over a year after that one! I could easily have lost my leg! Now I give any form of bank a lot more respect than I did that day! You never know what can come down when you least expect it!
Thats a scary story. Makes me think about loading concrete into dump trucks with my bobcat. I have had several pieces at different times try to come crashing back into the entrance of the cab from 10 to 12' up. Lately i have been thinking over welding a re-enforced steel door across the open cab front to stop one of those fifty pounders from finding its way in. Here is a link to gov data on skid steer accidents http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/98-117/
Hidden rebar in debris piles is another one that will getcha. A 20' stick bent up and hidden a debris pile has a lot of potential energy when you "free it" from where it wants to be.
Yair . . . Too true CM1995 . Another trap for inexperienced folks when clearing/stacking timber is the danger of springy saplings or trees, especially palm trees being wound up and then slipping over the top of (say) a dozer blade but it can happen with any machine. Cheers.
Running an ASV a few years ago backfilling some drain tile. Had been at it for 8hrs or so. Going up and down the same ramp all day hauling pea rock. For some reason one of the last buckets going down the machine decides to start tipping forward. No problem since I have the bucket only a foot or so above ground. Just lower the bucket to bring the back end down. I am 6-3 so I am a tight fit, the ball on top of my cap rubbed the roof. Well when it came back down it bounced just enough to pile drive my head into the roof. I felt things snapping in my upper back. Ended up with 6 compression fractures of my spine. 8 weeks later I was back to work on light duty. Still sore to this day.
A friend of mine has an 1835B Case and he uses it to clean out barns and hog houses so he cut the rops down 2" to clear the buildings which was fine until he installed a new seat. He was using it in his yard one day cleaning out an auger and ran over one of the 4x4's he had laying on the ground so he knew where to stop with his tandem while dumping into the auger. He spent 4 days in the hospital because he they thought he had a contusion from hitting the cab with the top of his head. He is only about 5'8" and i am 6'3" and refuse to run it. I cant even sit up straight in it on flat level ground