Seeing as the California thread was so popular, I'd be interested in seeing if everything is really bigger in Texas! Lets see if we can put down who the big fleet owners currently in and around Texas and perhaps list their fleets.
California has always had the most scrapers in the nation because of the more mountainous terrain. They have to flatten them and move them in order to build anything. It's pretty flat here in the more populated areas.
Yair . . . d9gdon . That was always my understanding . . . and the fact that many of those mountains were made out of "scraper dirt" instead of rock certainly helped. (he grins) Cheers.
Yeah, I'd like to see one of those 8' tall plows run thru here behind a couple of D11's. They'd be a tad longer when done. 6" of black dirt, 6" of caliche, and 7' of rock. There once was a guy named R.G. LeTourneau who knew a thing or two about scrapers and had a factory just 350 miles east of here. I'm going to nominate him for having the all time biggest scraper spread in the nation, and he didn't answer to Caterpillar. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahH7B5-O8Vc In fact, triple hitched 657's didn't even come close: "The largest scraper ever made was LeTourneau's LT-360 which was called the Electric Digger. It had 3 scrapers joined together, was almost 200 feet long, each scraper bowl could hold 120 tons of material. This scraper had 8 engines with a combined 5,080 horsepower." Your list doesn't have to be very long to have the biggest scraper spread. He not only built them, he used them. Once he was hired by a TxDOT contractor to move a couple of million yards of fill and completed it in a couple of months back in the late sixties, with 7 or 8 machines. I'm going by memory there, but I know where to find the whole story. So yeah, we do have a few big scraper spreads here. By the way, they were electric HYBRIDS forty years before the greenies ever dreamed of them.
Yair . . . d9gdon . I too think R. G. LeTourneau was an amazing man with ideas way before his time. I once had a book, quite a large book about his life story and innovations but had it ruined in a flood. Cheers.
In the Dallas area, I think the following contractors still run sizeable scraper fleets: 1. Mario Sinacola and Sons 2. RPMx Construction 3. Vilhauer Enterprises