My photo collection

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?

mowingman said: What type of machinery did they replace this dragline and reclaimer with? Click to expand... 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.

245dlc said: 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 View attachment 190145 View attachment 190146 View attachment 190147 View attachment 190148 back in about 2002 or 2003 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada when I was living and working there. View attachment 190145 View attachment 190146 View attachment 190147 View attachment 190148 Click to expand... 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.