I have often wondered why faceshovels on smaller machines aren't a thing especially in quarries and the like. The advantages I see are that there's no bench to cut like with a hoe, faster cycle times because bottom of the bucket only just clears the truck bin or crusher bin then opens, just basic time and motion stuff. But the real bigie is when they breakdown access is so much better to facilitate the repairs. Another jobsite I reckon they would be better is working in tunnels and other tight areas. I don't know of any manufacturer that even offers a faceshovel as an option.
I don't know. Shovels were here doing there work many decades before excavators. I see functional cable shovels from the 1900 decade. I once marvelled at John Abbott loading trucks from a sand pit with a Bucyrus-Eyrie diesel cable shovel. I imagined no faster way to move the earth. By chance, a close friend of my father owned a played out gravel bank along side a railroad track. Carthusian monastery rented his space, received many car loads of granite. They stockpiled the whole 6 acres with blocks. Bought a new Bucyrus Eyrie machine with crane, dragline, shovel. As a little kid, seeing these men in their bathrobes moving stone weighing ten tons each was fascinating! The bathrobes weren't making sense, the machines were! I think it was 50 years, the County Sherriff bought the well preserved machine. He was retiring young, hoped to dig ponds as a second carreer. Sad story; he died. His wife ignored it a number of years, sold it cheap.
I stopped to pee end of day 30 years ago 50 miles from home. By chance, I discovered a wonderful machine! I later learned it was an Austin Western Badger 3/4 turn cable shovel. Mounted up above a large tracked base was an International Harvestor M tractor. Instead of rear tires it had sprockets. These used chains to power tracks. Pto supplied a series of gearboxes, with winches. It was a magnificent machine! I needed to own it! I never did acquire it, but I know its owner. Neither of us will live to see it work again.
I've turned the bucket around to load out of stockpiles with an excavator when I only needed a couple of loads and didn't want to take the time to build a bench. It's kinda fun and fairly fast except it's hard to see over the sideboards and you have to work it more to get a full scoop. I can see where a real shovel would shine in that situation.
I guess it depends on what you call small but Cat has the 395 FS
Thinking from 30-12 ton machines, give or take.
Ya that is small lol. I doubt the annual sales would even justify the start of research and development of a tiny quarry machine for most OEMs. - the reach would be very limited -breakout force would be limited -complex linkage and high purchase costs. -limited production and bucket capacity. Would a 12-30 ton machine ever be able to do the work of a “quarry machine” ? Or at least be productive enough to justify having it in that role ?
But a hoe pulls loose material all up under itself. I've often thought I want an object 10 feet wide, four feet across, 2' tall I could place between the machine & the pile. I use a backhoe, even an excavator with blade is too close to the tracks.
In my extensive wandering around the internet, I've seen a few 25-35 ton excavators converted to shovels. There is a video of 328D shovel digging a deep basement for a commercial building somewhere on youtube, but I can not find it. This one was in a booth at Bauma years ago, that's about all I remember about it.
Not necessarily quarry work but limited access sites along with Hydrema type on-site trucks a faceshovel could be away more efficient than a hoe. The hoe verses wheel loader argument was settled years ago. The hoe halved the cost per cubic yards for the same load times. I kinda figured that a shovel can use a much bigger bucket owing to the shorter radius boom set up therefore more in cost savings if load times improved. I would like to hear from anyone in the mining industry about the difference between them were the same base is used, say a PC1200 for example.
I think an excavator is a much more versatile machine. Just loading trucks the trucks you can spread material out easier if required.
You've got to think outside the square a little Dave. Quick Hitches change the dynamics heaps, fitting a vertical tree grab and ýou have a landclearing machine is only one other possibly. Probably more things I haven't thought of yet.
Im sure if there was a market they would build them. We run excavators in our quarry. I don't think it's losing any money
I've heard of Australia land clearing with two large dozers & a long heavy chain. Aside from that, there can be no one machine better suited than a large excavator. Even a huge tree is no match for a 40 ton excavator. I envision clearing 120 foot tall trees with a dozer. Seems a near certainty, sooner or later gonna land one on the ROPS.
There's a lot of urban clearing going on here, 10 acre lots being subdivided and done with excavators only on total clear sites. The max size machine required is a 30 tonner with 20-25 tonners being the predominant size. There is still sites that are being select cleared and excavators of 10-15 tons are used,they still can have some big gnarly trees on them that have to be removed. All trees that go through a grinder( wood hog) are cut into small lengths using a shear , well heck there's another job a shovel boom machine can do
IIRC in the Bucyrus Erie book there was something similar.
Around here they use face shovel buckets on 30-40 ton hoes to load grain from open piles into semi trailers. The bucket opens from the bottom using slide gates.
BE made a 60-S prototype 5yd. swing shovel that was apparently very efficient and fast. It was never put in production though likely because it had a very complex and expensive boom arrangement. Here's some info on it from a book published and only available from BE. I had a to pay a ridiculous customs charge to bring the book it into Canada. You couldn't even order it through a book store. Unfortunately it only goes to 1980.
So they have an impressive machine loading trucks. With a Skidsteer feeding it lol.
The one factor I feel is important does not seem to have been mentioned up to now. Face shovels are intended for fast loading of large quantities of any "previously loosened" material, be that by blasting, ripping, or the nature of the material itself (the example above regarding corn is a good one). This limits their usefulness significantly in my opinion, because in general they won't dig in-situ material, at least not efficiently anyway..
Check out Mike Mulligan by Virginia Lee Burton. Greatest piece of children's literature ever. "Four corners neat and square." Dug the cellar for the new Town Hall in Popperville.
Good question and a sharp observation. Face shovels actually do have those advantages, but they’re generally used on larger mining-class excavators because their design makes the most sense at that scale. On smaller machines, a few issues limit their practicality: Geometry and stability: Small excavators don’t have the counterweight or boom geometry to handle the forward-facing leverage of a face shovel efficiently you’d lose breakout force and risk tipping on uneven ground. Visibility and control: Operators on smaller rigs rely heavily on direct sight lines; a face shovel setup blocks a lot of that view. Versatility: Standard backhoe (hoe) configurations are far more flexible for general digging, grading, and loading the kind of mixed work smaller machines do daily. Market demand: Quarries and tunneling operations that could use them typically step up to medium or large mining gear, where face shovels already exist. That said, your logic about tight-space efficiency and easier maintenance is spot-on if a manufacturer ever engineered a compact, well-balanced face shovel attachment, it could have a niche following in tunneling or specialized loading.
Would think excavators have much higher breakout force and can take as big or as little a bite as necessary for the conditions. Much faster to reposition if small bites are required.
All of that is correct Dave but equally there are plenty of situations where a shovel would be superior and more cost efficient. One job I had was running a track mounted crusher, loading it with a excavator and working alone. Sitting on a bench feeding the crusher then having to come down a clear the heap from the end of the belt was a PITA, a job were a shovel would have made complete sence to use.
Excavators are designed to pull the bucket towards the machine. Cylinders all extend to load bucket. Any operation mimicking a face shovel is going to go against the principals of physics. Face shovels have the cylinders arranged so they are pushing. Anyone that has ever operated an excavator with the bucket backwards knows it's not production work, it's merely situational.
Doing precision work an excavator is superior because you can see exactly what the bucket is doing. I can't imagine you could do drainage work very well with a face shovel.
All the Japanese excavators were first designed as face shovels. That's why they all have the auxiliary valve spool installed in their main control valves that everyone used for auxiliary functions like thumbs and such. This was from the Hitachi and Komatsu factory reps in the late eighties.
Strange you say this Dave. Another job I was involved with was installing 800m of 2.5metre pipe in narrow easement. The only way it could be done was dig, lay and backfill. The entire length of that job was done with the bucket reversed on hoe. In places the hoe couldn't swing around because the boom was to long, with a shovel it would have been a peace of p*^s In the background is the digger that was used and the only left in the world. https://www.vttourism.co.nz/__data/assets/image/0010/662653/Roger-Mahan-Heritage-Centre-face.jpg
In some cases an excavator isn't the best option but when I look at pics. like Shimmey's drainage work I can't see it being done that well with a face shovel. If you have a trench with a flat bottom makes it easier if you just have to put the bucket on the bottom to extend the trench.
My point is that it's all horses for courses, some jobs can be done a better than another. As it was with the old rope machines were booms were interchanged to suit the task. Never in their wildest dreams would the old fellas send a drag line out to dig a sewer main up a street, that was a hoe job.
Not so fast, in my neck of the woods, our city sewers were installed in the 30s, and some of it is over 25' deep. History here says they dug most of it with draglines.
On the few occasions when you had a proactive municipality no doubts.
Front end loaders probably saw the end of the small face shovels. Although it seems civil engineering seems to think backhoe style excavators can do anything and everything cheaper and more efficiently then anything else and have forgotten that things like graders can slope banks and dig V drains far cheaper, or loaders can load trucks more efficiently.
Clark figured the 675 loader was faster carrying material directly to the hopper than loading trucks. It was painfully slow with a full bucket going up an incline in their own promotional video.
Yet hoes and shovels can load trucks at half the cost of wheel loaders and that's how they cornered the market for these applications. Loaders still have a place were agility is a requirement
Very rarely can a blade get down in the ditches around here with our soil types. It's the same reason why we HAVE to have LGP dozers.
We are kind of rural here. I feel excavators srrived here years later than in more populated areas. We have played out gravel pits all over Vermont with rusted cable shovels. I'd guess shovels preceeded track hoes by 80 or even more years. First excavators I saw were in 1979 when Larry (Boob) White bought two to dredge the local rocky brooks after a major storm event. Both were John Deere a 690 & a 790. I was in awe of them. Prior to that construction, as in houses were dug with either crawler tractors, or other makeshift methods. One old gent proudly showed me a 3 point hitch scoop on a Ford 9N tractor. We started seeing backhoes on wheel tractors mid 1960s.
The skidsteer is just cleaning up around the air pipes and edges. The excavator is digging into a pile of corn that's probably 100' tall.
We call that pimping for the hoe. I've done it with a small dozer. Jjust cleaning up keeping the immediate road okay at the load face area. There's a grader out there taking care of the rest of the roads.
The smallest face shovels I recall in action were Cat 235’s back in the late 80’s and a few 245’s. Obviously,there were many special application smaller models for skimming the tiny coal seams we suffer from in the UK. On a different note,some were forward dump only as opposed to clamshell
That scooper is somewhat similar to the Bucyrus Erie 60-S prototype.
Crazy they didn't think of fitting a 4n1 bucket, would have improved the cycle times hugely.
Neat to see in action, that is quite a linkage set up!
I think of all those pins & bushings to wear out.
I worked at a sand mine with a similar arrangement. Problem was the ground conditions were very poor and the face was prone to sloughing off. It came to a head when the bench caved and dumped the excavator halfway info the pit. Production shut down, MSHA was called (and very unhappy about the arrangement being used), just a mess in general. Management asked for suggestions to improve methods, I recommended a small face shovel to feed the screen while keeping the operator off a potentially unstable bench. It was never seriously considered and the mine shut down at the end of the year due to poor economics resulting from unpredictable deposit geometry. Chasing pay zones works with a high-grade gold mine, not so much with sand and gravel.
I got sent this picture last week. 315 with a custom front and 4n1 bucket supposedly put together to dig basements under existing buildings.
Interesting they went with a GC version for such a custom build yet it has some sort of aftermarket electronic box on the stick. Also gotta be careful with that hose block on the nose of the stick. Cool machine - thanks for sharing.
1956. 1 of YouTube videos
Modern little Moxy
That's an interesting setup. I'd like to see it in action. So... Would you dig over the idlers or the finals with that one?
Are those hydraulic hoses on the boom and behind the bucket? Don't think that would be factory?
The bucket on that one was converted from cable trip to hydraulic cylinder
I've been on lots of sites were this would be in it's element so much so it would put a conventional excavator to shame. Don't know about that box on the dipper though, could be a recipe for disaster of the electronic kind.
A few miles down the highway three brothers took over their father's business moving houses. Often they put them back where they were with a new cellar. Years back they had a surplus 6 X 6 with a Bantam excavator mounted on it, and a 12000 LB Track loader with Drott skid loader. Terrified me seeing a 19 year old driving under a cribbed up building digging for basement walls. One 3 story they did had I beams spaced 12 feet apart sitting on 7' tall stacks of 6 X 6 cribbing. Looked unstable as Hell. I think a gust of wind would have tipped it over. They will leave a 10 foot gap in the foundation wall to dig the center out after the building is back on a new foundation.
It seems shovels are pretty rare, I've not used one. It's an interesting concept. Certainly digging from a bank of loose gravel, a shovel would work well. Digging a hole from level ground, and breaking up hard bank soil, a hoe can take advantage of gravity to help pull material loose. Go back 50 or more years there were no excavators in my rural area. Gravel pit owners had cable shovels to load trucks. Cellar holes were mostly dug with bulldozers, or track loaders. Pretty slow compared to a modern excavator.
Sometimes I wish I had a proper shovel bucket
Small hybrid shovels were short lived by 60s replaced by new track & wheel loader designs that took over. Overseas neat to see new models of small shovels v US.
My dad bought a Koehring 405 front shovel in 1958 for use in building logging roads. That didn't work out at all so he installed a set of tongs on the end instead of the bucket for loading logs on trucks. Apparently that didn't work out profitably either because he pulled the shovel front off, installed a 60' crane boom and a clam shell bucket and used it to clear land. That worked until he passed in 1971. The front shovel was displaced by track and wheel loaders. The air tongs were displaced by heel boom loaders with live grapples and the clam shell would have been displaced by hydraulic excavators with thumbs for clearing land. Technology always moves forward in efficiently and displaces what came before.
In the evolution of machines I'm surprized how far we've come in so few years. My world is rural. No new technology comes here until it is profitable. First excavators came here in 1979 in the aftermath of a flood event when the Federal Government paid to ?dredge? miles of brook beds. Last year the decision came down: There will be NO dredging, even to save life & property.
Fish are more important than people now.
Fixed it for you......
Bugs & worms too. We used to have the end of the Town water line blow off above my house. When the Federal Government mandated we add chlorene, we couldn't blow it in the air any more. It might kill a bug or worm.
We do it down here all the time. Flush the line and the water runs down hill. FD flows hydrants where ever the hydrant is located.
We do the same here. One of the benefits of not living in the Northeast...
Our original system was built 1880. Up on Dorset Mountain, two natural springs were used to supply 200 homes, a number of farms, a village. It serves only the densley populated part of two towns. Amazingly, 115 year old galvanized pipe still functioned until 1996. Nighttime pressure (gravity) reached 250 PSI, it was done to relieve pressure, delay leaks. The end of the system is above my house. Water sprayed 70 feet in the air, and formed a huge ice berg in winter
Our local FD used to flow test whatever hydrants there we’re, that did not run into trouble with flow testing and retention pond or the nut bags. Now according to the Fire Chief for our bunny hugging frog smokers, they aren’t even check most river and pond hydrant’s as the poor fishies might get hurt. He told me, the one that was put in our ROW turnoff, was tried 2 years ago and it did like 10k in damages to the pumping units.
Our "NEW" system is NOT intended for fire fighting, no hydrants. We have clean out fixtures accept a 2" fire hose. We do have a great State program helps pay for dry hydrants. Mostly, land owners give rights to draw from ponds & streams. Our tiny two towns have dozens of these hydrants.
I suggested to My friend in the local VFD, and who spearheaded putting in dry hydrants, that maybe for testing, show up with a tanker full , and pressurize the line, to blow the silt away from the intake. Backflushing as it were.