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Working in Alaska pictures

alaskaforby4

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 3, 2010
Messages
536
Location
Alaska
Occupation
Owner Operator
Looks like a 15B just like the one i have in my yard.:cool:

They were pretty neat old machines, does yours run or is it a "ornament"?

Just read the whole thread...Good stuff.Alaska is a beautiful place and I plan on visiting it.Its on the list of places I am going to tour once the Grizzly truck is back on the road....
I like the no permit/inspector thing.I have just over two acres and the city wont give me a building permit to put up a 40x50 building.I live out in the country on ALR land.....go figure..

Yeah the no permit/inspections thing is a double edged sword, there are a lot of improperly built and downright scary buildings. One guy wanted me to install a sewer and waterline stubbed under the house. It was a 3 story place. After looking at the foundation, it was built with a single cinder block placed on dirt, spaced about 8' apart. I politely declined that one. Of course the no permit thing is just the tiny little town I'm in, any of the larger areas have the same bureaucracy that you face.
 

bobcat1

Well-Known Member
Joined
Nov 12, 2014
Messages
59
Location
ontario
Brought mine home in the fall. It is one of the shop projects this winter. Mostly needs just a little TLC.
.
 

truklodyte

Well-Known Member
Joined
Dec 24, 2009
Messages
127
Location
Panama city Fl
Occupation
equipment opp
the nice thing about having your own coal,you could heat the shop. O r build a building with container boxes and heat it with the coal.
 

alaskaforby4

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 3, 2010
Messages
536
Location
Alaska
Occupation
Owner Operator
Brought mine home in the fall. It is one of the shop projects this winter. Mostly needs just a little TLC.
.
I have a video around here somewhere of running it, I'll have to dig it up. They are a treat thats for sure!


the nice thing about having your own coal,you could heat the shop. O r build a building with container boxes and heat it with the coal.
Yeah, its nice to have around thats for sure. Although it isn't very high grade coal and creates quite a bit of ash. Additionally we have an excess of wood, people always try bartering down the price of a project if we keep the timber, I usually go for it once or twice a year and get stocked up. One year I struck a deal with a wood processer and he came and cut and split everything. That was nice, took the work right out of it!

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alaskaforby4

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 3, 2010
Messages
536
Location
Alaska
Occupation
Owner Operator
I don't know about you guys, but we are always being asked to move buildings. Personally I've always rejected the idea, it is really quite the specialty trade, with numerous jacks, beams, dunnage trailers and so on. I'd rather leave it to the professionals. In this case though it is my building and I wanted it moved to another area on the property as the main house was build directly behind it.
The cabin was build in 1960 and is really quite run down. I had originally planned on just demoing it, until the wife got some "ideas" We ended up fixing up the inside and turning it into a nightly rental. I was skeptical to say the least, surprisingly though with all the tourism in our area we kept it rented for about 4 mo. strait at $90 a night!

I still wanted to move the thing this fall, so I thought we'd give it a shot. I was not at all concerned if it came crashing down and we burned it in place.
Upon digging it out we found it was just placed on topsoil with now rotten piles, half the floor is rotten. Its probably a waste of money but a friend has a mill so we made some beams to stick under there.

The plan was to get the loaders swapped over to forks, stick some steel beams under it and lift it up high enough to get a trailer underneath and away we go. We had another site for it about 1/2 a mile away.

We got everything staged and I played conductor for the two loader operators and it lifted right up. Pretty heavy old building!

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We then built a 3" pony wall wall round it for a small crawlspace. We ran out of time to backfill it, froze up pretty good now. It still requires quite a bit of money to get it finished out. Hope it doesn't collapse in the meantime :D

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alaskaforby4

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 3, 2010
Messages
536
Location
Alaska
Occupation
Owner Operator
Bucket Maintenance.

Let me start by saying that I am not a welder or make any claims of such, But! I do really enjoy it and am slowly learning how. I have even more respect for the welders and fabricators out there who can do it relatively fast and make it look easy.
Doing our bucket maintenance has been a perfect spot to practice. I am still amazed at how much time it takes, These are relatively small buckets and I have about 80 hrs into them. I see those monster buckets with miles of hard facing and I now have twice the appreciation.

We installed a WB coupler on the Komatsu 160 so we can interchange buckets between the two, this is the 160 dig bucket.

Basically just needed a few hardfaced wearstrips along the bottom. On the sides of all the buckets Ive been recycling our old 1" hardened cutting edge and applying it along the edges, as this is where the majority of the wear is.

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On the 160 Cleanout bucket I cut all these little pieces out, welded them in place with .045 dual shield base pass and covered them a .045 Stoody Hardfacing
Talk about time consuming!:eek: The idea is that between the small plates and in all the XX hardfacing is that the dirt will pack in there and wear dirt on dirt, versus wearing directly on the steel. Works great for the material in my area.

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alaskaforby4

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 3, 2010
Messages
536
Location
Alaska
Occupation
Owner Operator
This bucket picked up at a auction and it was pretty feeble. So, It got a complete makeover, on this one I opted to just cut solid plates out for the sides and hardface those. Somewhat less time consuming but it still took forever. Along the bottom I placed a few pieces of grader blade, as well as extending the sides up a bit more.
The bolt on cutting edge was pretty warn, but I still have about 1.5" before it comes in contact with the bucket so I opted to weld on some extension pieces to get into next year. With cutting edges from Weldco Beales at $1000 plus $50 in bolts I am all about extending the life of them :)

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This is the JD 120 bucket, This one got a new edge as well as some recycled cutting edge corner pieces, we are going green! :D
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Hopefully with all this work I will just have to "touch-up" some of the hardfacing from year to year. That's the plan anyway....
 

mog5858

Well-Known Member
Joined
Feb 1, 2015
Messages
100
Location
estavan SK
nice work it can be fun fixing up a bucket but then when it come back in after a year and you see all your hard work gone.
 

alaskaforby4

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 3, 2010
Messages
536
Location
Alaska
Occupation
Owner Operator
nice work it can be fun fixing up a bucket but then when it come back in after a year and you see all your hard work gone.

Haha, so true. But atleast we get some good use out of them and make a little $$, hopefully. This bucket we actually did last year, It just needed a edge flip and a little touchup hardfacing. I'm really hoping that by going over all this stuff it will just require routine maintenance and not have epic failure.

Bucket.jpg

Its all just soooo........F**CKIN EPIC!!!!!

Thanks for the enthusiasm! :)
 

alaskaforby4

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 3, 2010
Messages
536
Location
Alaska
Occupation
Owner Operator
Since alot of places are remote access around here we do quite a bit of Helo-assisting.
This particular project was placing a radio tower atop of a mountain for the Alaska Railroad.
They flew up a very miniature bobcat skidsteer and excavator, looked to be about as useful as
a decent laborer :rolleyes:

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alaskaforby4

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 3, 2010
Messages
536
Location
Alaska
Occupation
Owner Operator
That is a abandon Alascom "earth station" in the background. They built a bunch of housing around here in the 80's and moved some 25 families up to run it. It has sat dormant for the last 20 years, rusting away. Its a shame to see such hopeful infrastructure fail like that.
 

CM1995

Administrator
Joined
Jan 21, 2007
Messages
13,248
Location
Alabama
Occupation
Running what I brung and taking what I win
Nice work on the bucket.:thumbsup

I'm the same way, we don't scrap any useful steel that can be used as wear strips on buckets. I've been known to change out dozer cutting edges a little early in order to have material for a bucket that needs repair.

Building a dump trailer out of spare parts at the moment - https://www.heavyequipmentforums.com/showthread.php?64981-Dump-trailer-build&p=678075#post678075

We get a kick out of taking the old and making something new out of it.
 

alaskaforby4

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 3, 2010
Messages
536
Location
Alaska
Occupation
Owner Operator
Nice work on the bucket.:thumbsup

I'm the same way, we don't scrap any useful steel that can be used as wear strips on buckets. I've been known to change out dozer cutting edges a little early in order to have material for a bucket that needs repair.

Building a dump trailer out of spare parts at the moment - https://www.heavyequipmentforums.com/showthread.php?64981-Dump-trailer-build&p=678075#post678075

We get a kick out of taking the old and making something new out of it.

Thanks CM, I greatly enjoy reading about your conquests! I am not much of a hoarder, but when it comes to steel..... well lets just say I cant throw it away :D

what no snow??? this time of year that far north & you can see green grass!!!!

Haha, yeah that climate change is really getting us this year :D Actually it has been a much normaller? year, It reached 40F last week, which I haven't seen in my area since I was a kid. Up in the arctic circle where I used to work if you throw a cup of hot water up into the air it will evaporate into steam and ice before it hits the ground. So we tried that... Not much to do when its that cold except feed the fire.. Heres the full video https://youtu.be/X24R9AzOKAE

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We have been getting a fair amount of snow this month, we have 3 plow trucks and trying to keep them all up and functioning is like trying to hit a moving target. They dont like being mini dozers... :beatsme When it was really cold I tried moving one of the trucks and the shift tube sheared right off inside the column! oops

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d9gdon

Senior Member
Joined
Feb 12, 2010
Messages
1,517
Location
central texas
That shifter problem is very common on Ford pickups. I've had to replace one before, and I've only owned one Ford.
 

alaskaforby4

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 3, 2010
Messages
536
Location
Alaska
Occupation
Owner Operator
That shifter problem is very common on Ford pickups. I've had to replace one before, and I've only owned one Ford.
Yes, after researching it for a moment I found lots of others with the same problem. I was NOT looking forward to taking the dash apart, as in my experience some chintzy plastic piece usually breaks. Once again I was astonished by Youtube and how useful it can be! Watching it being done first is a great help. Good thing too because we have been getting hammered with snow this January.

Currently we are working on hauling 1500 CY to a cell tower site, It has been a complete nightmare so far. I thought stripping overburden was tedious, removing 2.5' of snow with a excavator bucket is mind numbing! The ground is just rock hard, trying to scrap out 6' of frost to get to thawed material is a nightmare as well.
I don't know what I was thinking, taking on this winter work? We are supposed to start trucking it today, I hope so because it wont be long until it turns back into a frozen block.

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alaskaforby4

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 3, 2010
Messages
536
Location
Alaska
Occupation
Owner Operator
IMG_0323.JPG IMG_0330.JPG IMG_0335.JPG We made it through the frost! Once we had a hole going we bailed as much as we possibly could. Turned out to be a very impressive hole! We sucked about 1200 CY out of there. This year I installed a Quicksilver plastic liner from Quadrant and it worked flawlessly. No sticking whatso ever. In the KW we sprayed it down with a 50/50 antifreeze mix and it would last all day. After about 15-20 loads we were getting minimal sticking but would still slide right out. Still have a few hundred more yds to haul but the temps have dropped way down again. Hate running anything below -10f seems that things just start breaking.
 

alaskaforby4

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 3, 2010
Messages
536
Location
Alaska
Occupation
Owner Operator
Here are a few pics of the liner we put in, Its 1/2" thick with all sorts of silicone and stuff in it. We dont haul asphalt but it is rated. It came in a large roll, had to stretch it out flat for awhile.
We re-lined the corners with steel so it would sit flat against them. It is bolted down at the doghouse and then these "flaps" hold it in place along the edges, the rear is free. I personally dont like this, I think sand will eventually migrate underneath it. I originally thought about bolting the rear down as well but going for 60*f inside to 0*f outside, the entire liner will actually contract about 3 inches!! So apparently in needs the room to expand. Guess we will see how it holds up over time
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mog5858

Well-Known Member
Joined
Feb 1, 2015
Messages
100
Location
estavan SK
looking good. they used stuff like to lines some of the big drag line buckets around hear. over 100 yards plastic can be wonderful things if used right but can be a bugger to work with. we make plastic rollers and shivs for the big guys they last longer than steel one to do plus the way lighter when you have to get them in to place up on the boom. keep up the good work,
 
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