I've got a hodge podge of photo's I've taken over the years and thought I'd share them with you guys some of them date to when I was a kid (38 now). I found this Koehring 866 back in about 2002 or 2003 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada when I was living and working there.
Some photos taken near the Syncrude facility north of Fort McMurray, Alberta where they have a walking dragline on a bit of a display and a bucket wheel rehandler ( not a bucket wheel excavator I'm told).
What type of machinery did they replace this dragline and reclaimer with?
Trucks and shovels it was one of the main reasons for the development of the Cat 797 haul truck and the O&K RH-400 hydraulic shovel.
Looks like it had the air toggles for the dipper and bucket. Ran a triple 6 a couple times. That was about a giggle.
These next few are my friend Grant's 3964 International excavator its the second one he's owned he bought the original many years ago to replace a Case Drott40 or 1085 I can't remember which but the 'Drott' as they are simply known as here was equipped with a shear type feller-buncher and this shortwood pulpwood grapple. He used the Drott originally to cut and load his own pulpwood as he already had his own truck and trailer and this way he didn't have to depend on anybody else to hire him for hauling. But the Drott would often slip and slide on the thawing logging roads and ice roads where he was working and he would have to resort to lowbedding it around which for him defeated the purpose of having a wheeled machine so he bought his first 3964 excavator and modified the shear and the grapple to fit. During the summers he picked up earthmoving work like ditching, basements, and rip rap work at a nearby hydroelectric dam.
Grant said he can't recall why he sold the original 3964 and regretted it as it had the joystick option but both machines gave him good service of the years, he said the grapple has been a very handy attachment over the years and he beefed it up so it can take more abuse. In recent years he used it to build a granite block wall for somebody's private marina when he couldn't source any proper rip rap. He also used the buncher to take out a tree in his yard that he was worried about falling on his house something his wife was against doing. So when she went out one day he put the buncher on walked over from his shop and snipped it off in to a couple pieces and then bucked it down in to firewood. He said it took a couple day before she noticed it was gone. lol
I originally met Grant when I was about 9 or 10 years old I lived in a very small town of about 1200 people and from as far as I can remember I loved earthmoving equipment and would spend my summers riding my bike around town hoping to see a water main break being repaired, a ditch being dug etc. etc. And well Grant got a small job digging a drainage ditch behind my former school so when he was pushing down trees to build a corduroy road to walk the machine on he said he'd feel safer if I stood behind his seat in the back of the cab and I started a long time friendship. He doesn't do as much anymore but still tinkers around and still takes on a few jobs as they come in.
On top of my childhood favorite excavator Grant also owns a Case/Poclain 125B and a '97 Kobelco ED180 Blade Runner that he bought new after successfully completing a large water main installation project for a small mining town.
Grant also built his own tilt-bucket for the Blade Runner as he wasn't satisfied with what was on the market and found them overpriced for what they are.
The Clark skidder belonged to Grant's older brother Mort who passed a way a few years ago sadly. He was a great guy to talk to and had many stories about driving Cat Trains in remote Northern Manitoba and Ontario as well building lagoons, roads, anything else built out of dirt or in our case mud. Sadly I met him later in life when he was cutting firewood for a few local customers in a mostly frozen bog near home. He also had a D7 and a cable scraper. He sometimes would work with is other brothers on larger jobs.
When I visited Mort at this particular place in time he was struggling to harvest any wood as the summer and fall had been quite wet and then it snowed before it froze holding the heat in the ground or errr......swamp, muskeg, loon ****. lol So he started packing down the snow with an old Alpine snowmobile and then scraped it off with his old Cletrac dozer to try and push the frost down but he did break through in a couple spots with the skidder.
Mort and slightly younger brother Wayne worked together on a little road building job outside of my home town Wayne was loading clean fill at the decommissioned town dump site and hauling it to Mort with his ex-army war stock D7G who then built up the road bed. Wayne's old 215 is also the same machine I learnt to operate shortly after high school.
Mort's ex-army D7G pushing in the lousy fill and building a road out of it.
Not all my photo's have a story behind them just sometimes machinery I've found in my travels like these ones. Sometimes old equipment sometimes new equipment.
This Hopto truck mounted excavator is a rare one I found at a farm yard near the U.S. border while exploring back roads last year it was in really good condition as far as I could tell but only the owner's wife was around but I guess they had some kind of electrical business as they also had an old Ditchwitch with a little backhoe and a Scoopmobile loader and some vans advertising the business.
Some Ditchwitch trencher photo's for you guys.
Here is another oddity that was built for the USAF to dig up UXO's I found it sitting at a farm in far Southwestern Manitoba during one of my trips last year most photos I've seen of them in books they had armored cabs and could be operated remotely for obvious reasons but unlike other rubber-tire excavators these used skid-steering.
I came across this wheeled International excavator last summer at a small scrap yard apparently still running fine (whatever that means), just kinda shame that somebody went and welded that thumb on to such a rare machine.
The two piece boom is also quite unusual for Canada as much as it probably is in the U.S.
The scrapyard also had this old P&H hydraulic excavator sitting on top of its scrap pile from the looks of it, it does the bulk of the handling there.
We went on a trip back to Southern Alberta for a friends wedding in July and came back through the Edmonton area before returning to Manitoba largely so I could see if there had been any progress at a new Heavy Equipment Museum so far it only appears they gotten more equipment and had to move it away from the Leduc #1 museum. They don't have a really good website sadly and aren't active at all on Facebook sadly or any other social media which is pretty frustrating.
The Leduc #1 museum had lots of outdoor displays as you can see with a bit of information about pipelining and that kind of thing.
Last but not least is Keith Haddock's very nice looking Bucyrus Erie 10B
Some pretty interesting iron there.
On our long way home we came across this used equipment yard near Vermilion, AB so I took some photos they had some ex-British Army trucks from CFB Suffield an army base in Southern Alberta used by the British Army for training large mechanized forces. Usually known to them as British Army Training Unit Suffield or BATUS.
We made a pit stop in North Battleford, SK along the banks of the North Saskatchewan River found another used equipment dealer and a auction yard to photograph some equipment.
I've spent several years as a Volunteer Firefighter in the past and have been on many grass and brush fires and always wanted to try using a crash truck and found this one by the Hancock Scraper.
Some pictures from my early days as an operator when I moved to Edmonton, AB and everything was booming like crazy roads and subdivisions were being built and upgraded. At the time this Hitachi EX1100 was the largest machine I ever saw at 21 years old. It was being used to dig a storm retention pond in a residential subdivision it was loading Volvo A35's and A40's in two passes usually with I think a 9 yard bucket. The last picture was shortly after it finished digging an underpass on the Whitemud Freeway on the south side of Edmonton my first time encountering 'Big Orange'.
My dad gave me some of his photos from when he was a young engineer working at an Asbestos mine in Northern British Columbia the first few photos are of a small Placer Gold operation where a home made winching device dragged gravel on to a sluice box where water from a creek would wash the gravel. They also used a large monitor to wash down the banks and had a dozer to help with the mine. Dad said they mostly produced large nuggets for making jewlery unlike what you see on Discovery Channel.
Some gold nugget jewellery from the Placer Operation.
Some pictures of the Cassiar Asbestos mining operation high up in the mountains this is of course all shut down now by my dad always talks fondly of it and no he doesn't have any respiratory problems, he said the guys that worked in the screening house were exposed to the fine asbestos fibers as that's where the ore was broken up and screened to size. So here the blaster is preparing for another blast.
All the ore was hauled off the mountain with an aerial tramway.
The last of my dad's Cassiar B.C. pictures. He said when the mine closed the town was abandoned and destroyed pretty much but he enjoyed his time there.
A couple years ago I was driving through Southern Saskatchewan near Cadillac (yes that's the name of the town) I saw this immaculate Northwest Dragline swinging away cleaning out a farmers dugout. Man this guy could operate it was really neat to watch him. I wanted to get closer and talk to him but I couldn't find an entry through the barbed wire fence so I had to zoom in with the camera as much as I can.
These are getting to be rare machines. Found this in my travels as well not sure what the story is on it.
These guys had an interesting assortment of machines Cat's, Case/Poclain, Fiatallis, Michigan etc. etc.
From another little road trip in far Southern Saskatchewan last winter just as a winter storm kicked up I'm going to have to go that way again the roads are terrible (at least Hwy#18 is) but the scenery and terrain is amazing. This P&H hydraulic excavator is probably one of the first I've ever seen.
Few more from that trip.
Another set of pictures from a summer trip we had last summer going through the Bienfait and Estevan, Saskatchewan area where there are a couple large coal strip mines and about 3 or 4 draglines.
Found this Koehring 866 a few years ago in Edmonton, AB too bad it was so rough looking I think it use to belong to a sewer and water company I use to work for as they had a couple of them like maybe 3 or 4. And I seem to recall the guys there talking about one of the machines having a couple buckets joined together to make one wider bucket so it could sit on the spoil pile and pull away from the main line excavator that was pulling grade for the deep sewer being installed. And well just look at the bucket on this thing.
I had been offered the opportunity to run one of the last Koehring's they had another duplicate 866E but I was new and back and forth on a couple other jobs with a JCB loader/backhoe so they had an older more experienced guy run the old girl but it took them a while to get somebody to run it.
Found this old truck mount in Eastern Saskatchewan just a few miles from the Manitoba border some guys on Facebook figure somebody must of converted it from cable to hydraulic.
Another oddity owned by the Greater Winnipeg Water District Railway they traditionally had a small operating budget so they had to modify existing machines to suit their needs. So like this one was once on tracks like crawlers obviously and they modified it to run on the train tracks and these days it sits most of the time but they do fire it up once in a while to mow the weeds along the right of way.
A few years ago when I moved in to this area I came upon this abandoned dragline at a former gravel pit, its easy to see from the adjacent highway but I thought it was just on the other side of the bush line and upon further investigation it turns out its abandoned and heavily vandalized, its also a Marion though I'm not sure what model but I did take the builders plate in case it gets cut up for scrap. I don't have the money or resources to bring it back to life sadly otherwise it wouldn't still be sitting there as I've long wanted to learn how to run one.
Still bugs me that this thing is still sitting in the bush either waiting for the scrappers torch or a new lease on life.
A couple interesting roadside attractions I came across near Estevan, Saskatchewan.
Another Hy-Hoe this time on an agricultural wagon chassis that I found in far Southern Alberta near the Montana border. There is a lot of irrigation in that area so it might be something put together for maintaining the pivots for all I know.
A rare JCB I found in Coleman, AB several years ago don't know the story behind it but sure looks like its in good shape.
Another rare one an Allis-Chalmers loader/backhoe my home town use to have one for repairing water main breaks and other municipal maintenance jobs.
A Cat 215 still one of the best excavators they ever made.
When we lived in Lethbridge the city there did their own water main renewal work and used these Hyundai wheeled excavators to do the digging and backfilling.
I came across this Unimog near Picture Butte, AB when I was pricing out reed cutter bucket for some work I was looking at. These guy had equipped it with these round bale handlers.
Another road trip another antique.
Same road trip but an unusual find a bloody Liebherr!
Some pictures from a trip I made to Edmonton a few years ago for a funeral. Its nice when you have some time to be a tourist and can explore.
Some pictures of a local gravel pit operation there are a few like this in the area with our high water table. Some of these machines are quite large and the bucket or blade or whatever you want to call it probably vary from 3 cubic yards to maybe 6 or 7 cubic yards.
That looks like a Sauerman Skyline dredge setup.
In a nutshell these ones are built locally from what I'm told they aren't simply modified logging machines.
Interesting. How large is that bucket?
I'm not sure this was zoomed in from the road with our camera. I'm thinking 5 to 7 cubic yards maybe.
Boy I completely forgot about this thread guess I better add more. That Michigan loader had probably be the largest I've ever run it must be pretty close in size to a Cat 988B.
I had to hang the bucket a little over the tailgate because I couldn't see the front of the truck box. It was however a nice loader to run I wouldn't mind spending days on end running it.
A limestone quarry stripping operation I worked on a few years ago. We could of used a much larger excavator and bigger rock trucks. The soil on top of the limestone formation was all glacial till so some places you'd have soft silt, clay, hard pan with big boulders in it which made it tough for the two excavator we had which were one Kobelco 260 and a Kobelco 250. The rock trucks were all 25 tonners, two Volvo's and two Caterpillars. The Cat's had good A/C and a softer ride but the Volvo's had far fewer break downs.
The view from the Kobelco SK260 a nice machine but a 750 or 800 size machine would of been more appropriate with about 6 40 ton Volvo rock trucks with how much material there was to remove. We already had a D8K managing the Overburden pile.
Some pictures of the equipment the crushing contractor had and the drilling contractor. The main loader that fed the plant was either a WA500 Komatsu or WA600 I could never clearly see the model number because of the dust and dirt that covered it. They had Cat 980's also working in there. But every time there was a blast they would have to shut down the plant and move everything. Other operations in the area would either use a larger loader to tram to the crusher or they would use rigid frame haul trucks to haul to the plant.
My pre-digital camera days, back in 2002 I came across Sureway Construction's EX1100 loading 35 ad 40 ton rock trucks in two passes or less.