Hi, Folks. Here is another jigger that Dozerman and I found today, although I guess its owners didn't think it was lost. It appears to be a 'stick-shift' IH TD20 with a Rolls Royce 'donk'. The tracks appear to be a little 'used' but the basic machine appears to be fairly straight. I operated one of these, minus the 'back-scratcher', in my younger days for a construction company in Perth, Western Australia. I quite liked running the jigger. Squizzy, are BA & WR Cooper still going, or couldn't they survive my employment with them, brief as it was? LOL. Please accept my humble apologies for the inclusion of the bit of blue 'pus' at the far right edge of the photo. LOL.
I believe members of the Cooper family are still in the game but the entity as you knew is now gone...I believe...somewhere around 1990 if I remember correctly. BA & WR Do not have a valid ABN according to the AB Register. I have done work for Cooper Dredging and Cooper Equipment Hire some years back. I wonder if these are related family members. http://www.hotfrog.com.au/Companies/Cooper-Group-of-Companies Cheers
Thanks. Hi, Squizzy. Thanks for that info.. BA & WR were the only company that I ever knew who were silly enough to buy an IH TD30. They spent heaps on the mongrel of a thing when it came out of warranty trying to keep it going. They finally de-rated it to about 260 hp and called it the TD27 1/2. It was supposed to be a D9G killer. LOL. If I remember rightly, their old yards were over around Morley somewhere. I went there a couple of times, one of them to pick up a Galion 118 grader with a 'screamin' demon' "jimmy' 4/71 diesel under the 'hat'. I had to take that down to a sub-division a bit West of Armadale and run it for a few days while the TD20 was in the workshop. Thanks again.
Hi Deas, I drove one of these machines during the 70`s (from the age of 11). My relative used to operate a number of them for the North Eastern UK National Coal Board on some very tough work. I used to have my flings with them on weekends and school holidays. The machine in your photo is a Brit (Doncaster) built IHC BTD-20, yep, as you mention, having a Rolls-Royce engine. Would loved to know the Serial Number of the one in your photo!! The back scratcher as you aptly put it looks like a home made fitment as I have never seen hydraulic feed pipes down the side of the dozer before, though ours were all fitted with cable drums for towed scraper ops. Its great seeing a surviving example far away from its place of build! Great photo. Regards, Dave: PS. We had a number of USA built rounded grille TD-18`s in use that were replaced by the BTD-20`s, but that was before my time.
Btd20 Hi Deas Plant This model, at least in my part of the world was called BDT20 as it was British made. I remember them working around where I lived as a kid, but I never got to try them myself. There were quite a few of them in my country and already a couple of years back there were still a couple of them in working condition. So with many things being said about poor reliability of IH machines, maybe these were not the worst models they put out? Hjolli
Is the Rolls-Royce engine gas or diesel? Thanks
The Rolls Royce is diesel
(b)td20 Hi, DaveC. Yes, the Rolls Royce engined TD20's that I saw were all British-built and were BTD20's. I just didn't name it as a BTD20 'cos I couldn't get to it to identify it as such. However, I have no reason to suspect that the American parent company ever saw fit to put a Rolls donk into one of their products. The one I operated was quite a willing performer with the Rolls motor, just like the Rolls Royce Merlin engines made a REAL performer out of the P51 Mustangs in WW2. Rolls Royce were quite an innovative company back then. The Merlin engines went from around 700 hp in the early 1930's when they were first introduced to something over 3000 hp by the end of WW2. The American company, Packard, built about '3 squillion' of them under license during that war, many of which went, in pairs, into the U.S. navy's PT boats. Your navy also used the Merlins in threes in its MTB's which got up to around 48 knots. I have heard that this was the fastest of any military vessel during WW2. I would guess that ripper is an Ateco. They were fitted to a lot of dozers in various places back in the 1950's, 60's and 70's. As you mentioned, from the plumbing, it was possibly an after-market fitment. As with all the other swivel-tyne rippers I ever used, they were a pig of a thing when trying to do any accurate ripping as the tyne would always try to swivel around the object you wanted to rip out. Hjolli, from what I can remember of them, the TD20's and BTD20's were a bit more robust where the earlier TD18's seemed to give most of their problems, in the back end. IH's back ends were their biggest failing in their bigger tractors here in DownUnder in the early days. The gas-diesel engines gave a bit of trouble with cracked heads from being shut down while hot but people did learn to live with that by idling them down. The back ends were a whole different ball game and were a large part of why IH faded from the scene around here. Then, to cap it all, they introduced the TD30. What a pile of junk that was. It was pretty much all downhill for IH in the large crawler market in Australia after that.