That O&K Grader.
Hi, Randy.
That grader was a BEAST and a half. Not as heavy or as powerful as the Cat 24's but still up there with the top end of graders.
At 42 tons and 400 hp and with a 20 foot blade, you can shift a LOT of material and look after a LOT of scraper-loads in a day. I had no problem looking after the fills and the haul roads for 3 Cat 660B scrapers on short hauls being push-loaded by a 'Kummagutsa' D455A dozer. I was also ripping the borrow pit floor for them, cleaning up after top-soil stripping, putting the last scrapings of top-soil into windrows that the scrapers could pick up, tining up any wheel-rolled areas before new fill material was placed there, getting the fills ready for wheel-rolling to seal them at night and doing any other little odd jobs that the foreman managed to dream up, all without sweat.
It had both blade lifts under the right hand, plus lean wheels and scarifiers/rippers. All other functions were under the left hand. The blade lift controls and a couple of others were air-over-hydraulic. Some were electric over hydraulic but none that required any degree of 'feel'.
It's a rigid frame machine - 'Give me 40 acres and I'll turn this rig around' - but still surprisingly handy when you are used to it. The transmission control, under the right hand, is a Morse cable control that has the early John Deere grader disease - it has the neutral position to the rear. It also has detents between gears, INCLUDING between first and neutral. Not smart.
I thought it had pretty good blade visibility and good general visibility all round. I could even see what the rippers were doing behind me.
All in all, I quite liked operating it. It felt stable and strong, it could put its grunt on the ground and it was pretty comfortable. I did a bit of batter cutting with it and didn't leave any 'twisty-cap' marks on the seat. I pushed the 660 scrapers out of bogs with monotonus regularity and could even push-load them way better than a 270 hp Cat D8H that was also on site.
I had been on a Cat 16 for about an hour 3 years prior to this and that was the biggest grader I had run to that time. Immediately before getting on the O&K, I was running an early Cat 14G and had no problem stepping up to the O&K. They had tried 3 other operators on it prior to me and none of them seemed to be able to get their heads around just how much it could do. They were running it with Cat 12-sized loads on the blade and falling way behind the scrapers all the time.
Just for an idea of what it could do, we were building an earth-wall retention basin for treated effluent for sugar cane irrigation. The base of the bank had to be keyed in down to good sealing clay. This meant that the scrapers would come through and cut a straight vertical-walled trench down to the clay. This trench might be anything from 2 to 4 feet deep. I would then come along with the O&K and cut one side of the trench down into the bottom for the scrapers to pick up. Then I would cut the other side the same way. It seldom took more than ONE pass, even in a 4-foot deep trench, to get the side cut down into the bottom for the scrapers to pick up. I was impressed.
When all is said and done, it is still basically a heavy, rigid-frame, haul road grader with all that implies but I liked it.
Any questions?
Remember you're talking to a Canadian ...eh?
