i've seen so many pics of scrapers buried in mud! sometimes with one or two push cats behind them!can someone tell me why you would run your scraper into loose, wet ,mud, with dozers pushing you ?and the dozer crowd keep going at it?
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stuck scrapers
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Taylortractornu
Charter Member
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- Nov 13, 2003
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- Iuka, Mississippi
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Good answer and alot of the time thats the correct answer. Long before my time the Tenn Tomm waterway was being dug trhough Mississippi and Alabama. Alot of the companies that got in on it hadnt done much scraper work before. One of my older friends worked on a crew that had 32 Terex
TS14's on one cut and it was in blue clay and in a real spring filled area. they were undercutting to move 2 creeks into one channel and they said the soup was over the seat belts. They had a hook and bail system on the 14's and would bail 10 machines togther to make a chain and put 4 push tractors behind. they werent in tough ground they just used the long scrapers to get tenough out the other side and pull them. they said when some hit the water they would through belts and every dump they had to have the radiators washed out with a big water truck. My friend said they stayed under water so much that the engines were cooled from it. He said that was a miserable week on that detail. olt of undercutting on that job was done like that because draglines and excavators coultdnt get outhere.
Dad and brother said they never missed working out there.
TS14's on one cut and it was in blue clay and in a real spring filled area. they were undercutting to move 2 creeks into one channel and they said the soup was over the seat belts. They had a hook and bail system on the 14's and would bail 10 machines togther to make a chain and put 4 push tractors behind. they werent in tough ground they just used the long scrapers to get tenough out the other side and pull them. they said when some hit the water they would through belts and every dump they had to have the radiators washed out with a big water truck. My friend said they stayed under water so much that the engines were cooled from it. He said that was a miserable week on that detail. olt of undercutting on that job was done like that because draglines and excavators coultdnt get outhere.
Dad and brother said they never missed working out there.
AtlasRob
Senior Member
I remember an old filled area that had to be removed and engineer filled during a Motorway construction contract back in the late 70's.
I watched dumbfounded as TS24's and Cat 637's hurtled into this boggy area only to get stuck, the D9 and D8's then struggled to make any headway
(especially when one or two scraper operators started blaggarding and selecting reverse to aid progress)
.
Many times cables had to be attached to pull the scrapers clear, but once loaded and mobile they were the best thing at the time to shift the mess.
I watched dumbfounded as TS24's and Cat 637's hurtled into this boggy area only to get stuck, the D9 and D8's then struggled to make any headway
(especially when one or two scraper operators started blaggarding and selecting reverse to aid progress)
.Many times cables had to be attached to pull the scrapers clear, but once loaded and mobile they were the best thing at the time to shift the mess.
micbare
Active Member
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- Jan 13, 2009
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- Martinez, Georgia
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- maintance man for a medical group
Stuck Scraper stories
My Dad told we a story about a stuck scraper that I thought was funny. When they were building I-95 down on the Georgia coast. He had a salesman ask to demo a new twin engine twin bowl scraper on his job. I think it was in the late 1960`s. Well I-95 on the GA coast is almost at sea level in some points. So these jobs required alot of fill and very little cut. So much of the fill came from borrow pits. And these jobs were very muddy and wet.
Needless to say they got this brand new twin bowl monster stuck( with both bowls full) in about 1 hour after it arrived on the job. According to my dad
the paint was still burning off the manifolds. Well they pushed and pulled on this thing with D9`s and D`8`s until they had pulled off the all hooks on the back and all the hooks on the front and front bumper off of this new machine. They tried diggin it out with dragline only to have it sink more. The whole time this was going on the salesman was almost in tears :crying watching this brand new machine getting pulled apart. They finally had to get the labors to hand shovel out the two bowls of this monster. He said it took two to three days:notworthy shovel the wet muck out of the bowls. And after that they got it out. The salesman politely ask could the demo be over
and took his double bowl monster back to Atlanta and he said he never saw another double bowl scraper or that salesman on the coast again
My Dad told we a story about a stuck scraper that I thought was funny. When they were building I-95 down on the Georgia coast. He had a salesman ask to demo a new twin engine twin bowl scraper on his job. I think it was in the late 1960`s. Well I-95 on the GA coast is almost at sea level in some points. So these jobs required alot of fill and very little cut. So much of the fill came from borrow pits. And these jobs were very muddy and wet.
Needless to say they got this brand new twin bowl monster stuck( with both bowls full) in about 1 hour after it arrived on the job. According to my dad
the paint was still burning off the manifolds. Well they pushed and pulled on this thing with D9`s and D`8`s until they had pulled off the all hooks on the back and all the hooks on the front and front bumper off of this new machine. They tried diggin it out with dragline only to have it sink more. The whole time this was going on the salesman was almost in tears :crying watching this brand new machine getting pulled apart. They finally had to get the labors to hand shovel out the two bowls of this monster. He said it took two to three days:notworthy shovel the wet muck out of the bowls. And after that they got it out. The salesman politely ask could the demo be over
and took his double bowl monster back to Atlanta and he said he never saw another double bowl scraper or that salesman on the coast again
ive seen the great exspense of these mega machines, getin buried in deep mud! why would anyone tell there team to put there equipment in the deep mud? ive seen so many pics of big buck equipment in bad places! i have to wonder!
Buckethead
Senior Member
I second what ZHKent said,
There is only one way to ensure a machine does not get stuck. That is to park it in some paved yard.
Turbo21835
Senior Member
There is a saying, run what ya brung. I know when I was in Ohio, the company I worked for had 4 25 ton trucks, and 3 35 trucks. Mean time we had 25+ terex ts 14s, and 8 627s. Safe to say, it had to be a real bad job for us to get the trucks. Ive taken scrapers into borrow pits where I had to stand on the throttles just to keep the seatbelt from cutting off circulation. The only reason we were using push cats was to push us back up the other side of the pit.
Sometimes the job starts out alright. On the surface, you know you have good dry ground. But if you are working close to a major water source such as a lake, if can get nasty right quick. Every time you run over that area, it helps push the water closer to the surface, making the ability of the ground to support the weight of the machine less. All of a sudden, that ground wont support the weight anymore, and the bottom of the world drops out from underneath.
We had one job where we were under cutting a building pad for a hospital. We were 25 feet deep. All of a sudden the bottom fell out on us. 1 627 got stuck. The second one got half a bowl of material, went and hooked the bail and tried to pull machine #1 out. It got stuck, same thing happended to #3, and then the D8R, and the D6R. Only machine on the job site not stuck was the 815. We had to haul in an excavator to get everything unstuck.
alan627b
Senior Member
A lot of the dirt scrapers work in is like a badly made pie....a real thin crust on top with a lot of chocolate pudding for the filling! Once you poke a hole in the crust, you're done.... some guys just don't realise that a half a load you can get out with, beats a big heaping load you get buried trying to crawl out of the cut with. Or get hung up on trying to unload.
Doesn't have to be mud for that to be true either...
I saw a Cat film called Making the Most With Scrapers, that clearly showed the false economy of wasting time trying to jam that extra yard in. They had a time lapse film with a clock and a yardage counter, using 657 scrapers.
The scraper that consistently hauled a good but not overflowing load, hauled something like 1300 yards more material per shift than the one being overloaded.
That also cost the other scrapers production, waiting for the pushcat to cycle back to push the next unit.
Hauling a huge load only pays off if you one of those real long haul situations.
Loading mud can be productive if you don't get greedy, and the operators can figure things out quickly. Don't ask me how I learned... LOL!
Doesn't have to be mud for that to be true either...
I saw a Cat film called Making the Most With Scrapers, that clearly showed the false economy of wasting time trying to jam that extra yard in. They had a time lapse film with a clock and a yardage counter, using 657 scrapers.
The scraper that consistently hauled a good but not overflowing load, hauled something like 1300 yards more material per shift than the one being overloaded.
That also cost the other scrapers production, waiting for the pushcat to cycle back to push the next unit.
Hauling a huge load only pays off if you one of those real long haul situations.
Loading mud can be productive if you don't get greedy, and the operators can figure things out quickly. Don't ask me how I learned...
LOL!
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