THIS IS FOR ALL THE NEW OPERATORS WHO THINK IT WOULD BE NICE TO HAVE BRAKES ON YOUR SCRAPER!!!! I myself am in my 50's now and it all started for me with my Dad. My Dad (May God rest his sole) ran a scraper for some 40 years and built bridges before that. After serving as a Sgt. in the Army Air Corps until the end of WWII and then coming back and started working as an Operator in the late 40's I was taught to respect my elders and I can remember every word I believe, that my Dad told me while we were laying in the woods listening to the hounds run coon (I was taught you never interupt). I would be a rich man if I got a Dollar bill for everytime my Dad said,"If you need to stop your scraper in a bad situation, Grab the lever, drop the pan and hold on!" It was always my 'Destiny' to work on the road with my Dad. The first year I did (Laborer/Flagman) I was changing a 21's dump cable along the haul road (Yes I should have had it blocked up but anyone who has worked on a big job knows that safety is thrown out the window sometimes). The guy working with me accidentally pulled the wrong lever and the pan dropped, the curved face of the apron came down hitting my shoulder which triggered my kicking response (don't ask me why) and my foot ended up under the cutting edged. The face of the apron braced my knee and the pan filled with sand, shoved my foot down into the sand. BATTERIES are another thing that were a luxury so I had to wait (while the First Responders were on there way) for a dozer to come and lift the pan up, you had to push them to get them started which was kind of out of the question at this point. After he got it held up the First Responder was going to pull my foot out but my heal of my boot was where my toes were supposed to be. I told her I would rather do it my self but after I grabbed my pant leg and pulled & my leg moved but my boot didn't I told her she could do it. To make maters worse we were in the middle of nowhere but on a major hiway and 180 miles by rescue squad t a hospital big enough to keep me a live and possible save my wringed off foot.
After a month and a half in the hospital and10 months in a cast 11 operations and 9 pulmanary emboli passing into my lungs I thought I was ready and setting on top of an old cable 21 CAT scraper. Brakes were not a part of the operation but gears and the weight of the machine, as well as planning ahead was. My second day found me "cutting off the top of a 70 degree hill with a river at the bottom. This si when all my Dads coaching from my birth and pulling the pan cable was usefully. I could nt hit 2nd to pull away fom the pushcat to save my life (literally) so off free wheeling I went down the 300 yard CLIFF. The first time I pulled that lever I will NEVER forget an not the 2 hours it took to unscramble the cables and re thread it and get going again. Once you start fee wheeling there is no way to get it into a gear and I had to ride it out until I was down at the bottum where the machines turned around to drop my pan so I was out of the way "Time is Money" and so is scrap pieces of cable. I felt bad for my father as his 21 year old son made a fool of himself so after my 3rd episode of pulling the pan lever and grabbing the steering wheel that was partial imbedded into my gut, I called it enough. I should have waited more than 28 days after being laid up for almost a year before going back to work. I had to lift my leg onto the cluth and I didn't have enough strength in my arms to twist a ballon figure. I gave it my best shot, so I went back to work as a Metal Fabricator for the goverment the next Monday. A few months later I got back to operating a buddies dad's D-6's and D-8's on the weekends and later 2 of my buddies and I started a business logging and then sawing the logs, we had it all. I was running a cable skidder in the Ocooch Mountains (which made the hill I started out cutting off look like the flat lands, seriously and guess what...It Had NO BRAKES EITHER...and we needed to build the business up before we could get it fixed-You Had to BE THERE. So, when you backed down the rocky mini mountains you aimed for a tree ahead of time so you would stop & I didn't even have a steering wheel to grab on to. Oh S___HOOT!!!
