The older heavy equipment is rough on the body what years or brands started looking into making them better for the person running the equipment. Or did they just get nicer as they built more and in a linear fashion? Was just wondering at work ill run for 10-14 hrs ill be tired but not hurting. then ill be home and run my old stuff for a few hours and just feel old and stiff
When I was a kid my dad had an International TD-9 crawler loader. He joked that running it was like working out on a Bowflex. Mechanical steering clutches, mechanical steering brakes, mechanical hand clutch, manual gear shifter, even the throttle lever was stiff. No ROPS and you kind of stuffed yourself into it like a bobsled. That was a machine built in the late 1950s. In contrast, the local excavating company had a pair of Deere 450 crawler loaders built in the 1970s. Power shift, reverser, decelerator, nice steering setup, nice open drivers platform. That machine was also at least twice as fast as the old IH. They were doing air conditioning and heated cabs in the late 1970s, but they didn't really get that figured out until well into the 1980s IMO. The old cabs were almost worse than an open station.
Ergonomics has happened in a linear time frame but in my view was generated by safety considerations and regulations. Since most huge projects are government funded it meant that they became government regulated as well. It wasn't just back up alarms, seat belts and ear protection that got looked at. Cabs with pressurizers, air conditioning, sound insulation, better seats and control placements that got mandated on machines that were on government projects filtered down into the used market where smaller contractors got to find out the advantages. The demand was there so the manufacturers jumped on the marketing potential and made a lot of the stuff standard equipment. Much of it also went onto the options list so anyone could have it on a new machine. The machine in my avatar was state of the art in 1959. I don't know of anyone who could run one now for more than four hours at a time.
I know of a scrap yard still running a 1960s lattice boom friction crane with a magnet all day every day. Screaming Detroit 2' from the operator's ear. One day they will bring in a new machine and its first job will be to destroy its predecessor.
I many times tried to tell my boss they should keep one Hough 120 loader and a Euclid R-35 parked out back in working condition. Then when the guy running the 988H or the guy running the 773G damaged something we could just let them spend a day or two running the older equipment while I took my time fixing their machines. I figured it would only take once or twice to give them the idea of how to treat the newer machines! That idea never took hold like my other idea that also was turned down. See we had a problem with clean up people damaging the ROPS on the skid-steer loaders. My simple "solution" to finding out who was doing it was to just remove the ROPS for a week! Figured after a couple days it would be obvious if a little bit messy to clean the skid steers! Don't think that one was approved by safety guys!