surfer-joe
Senior Member
No worries Brian. There are members on this forum with great stories and experiences to tell, and one thing I've learned over the years is that there are more ways to skin a Cat than Carter has pills. It's sometimes hard to visualize a project and the equipment needed to knock something out. But as in this case, when you see dredge, think wet. Anyway, as I was saying, one shouldn't take any slight over what is posted here. There is a lot of wisdom, trial and error experience, dry -- and wet -- humor, and just plain good advice, and lots of opinion…………
I said 637's can't swim, and that's pretty accurate. But I literally swam in the seat of TS32's trenching out the core for a dam near Buffalo, Wyoming. It was being dug 25 feet from a creek and the underlying material was all river-run gravel. We had to excavate 25 feet below the surface water level, then use select material to backfill, with compaction, and then dig a slurry cut-off trench and backfill that with Bentonite slurry.
We had five TS32's on the job, just up from Colorado and they were in rough condition. One night they were pushing them thru the trench with three D9G pushcats and one had transmission trouble. I had to make several passes thru the trench to get a feel for what was going on with the tranny, and by that time the trench was deep and so was the muddy water.
The seat on a TS32 is about 7 or 8 feet off the ground, and the water was slightly lower than my shoulders as the Cats pushed me thru. About all that was showing above the water on the Cats was the exhaust and the air intake cap. By the way, that water was colder than hell, it was late November. The pushcat operators all stood up on the seats as they hit the deep water, but they still got pretty wet.
After a couple of rounds like this I pulled up by the dirt super's pickup and mentioned that I thought he had gone as far down as he could with scrapers. He responded that I must be a candya$$ if I couldn't take a little cold water and muck. But he pulled over to the trench and watched for a bit, then moved the spread down a few hundred yards and finished the shift.
My mechanics and I had to stay over and wash out radiators and belly pans till the day shift showed up. Oh, the tranny problem turned out to be a loose electrical connector on the rear transmission. Water was getting in it and shorted it when ever it tried to hit 2nd or 3rd gear. Once we blew the water out and tightened the connector, the problem went away. But, with these old hard-used Eucs, there were always more problems popping up.
The project manager called off the scraper spread the next day after watching a couple of rounds like mine. We held a "what the hell do we do now" meeting, and eventually decided to dewater the trench with pumps and continue with the scrapers. That's a story in it 'self………..
I said 637's can't swim, and that's pretty accurate. But I literally swam in the seat of TS32's trenching out the core for a dam near Buffalo, Wyoming. It was being dug 25 feet from a creek and the underlying material was all river-run gravel. We had to excavate 25 feet below the surface water level, then use select material to backfill, with compaction, and then dig a slurry cut-off trench and backfill that with Bentonite slurry.
We had five TS32's on the job, just up from Colorado and they were in rough condition. One night they were pushing them thru the trench with three D9G pushcats and one had transmission trouble. I had to make several passes thru the trench to get a feel for what was going on with the tranny, and by that time the trench was deep and so was the muddy water.
The seat on a TS32 is about 7 or 8 feet off the ground, and the water was slightly lower than my shoulders as the Cats pushed me thru. About all that was showing above the water on the Cats was the exhaust and the air intake cap. By the way, that water was colder than hell, it was late November. The pushcat operators all stood up on the seats as they hit the deep water, but they still got pretty wet.
After a couple of rounds like this I pulled up by the dirt super's pickup and mentioned that I thought he had gone as far down as he could with scrapers. He responded that I must be a candya$$ if I couldn't take a little cold water and muck. But he pulled over to the trench and watched for a bit, then moved the spread down a few hundred yards and finished the shift.
My mechanics and I had to stay over and wash out radiators and belly pans till the day shift showed up. Oh, the tranny problem turned out to be a loose electrical connector on the rear transmission. Water was getting in it and shorted it when ever it tried to hit 2nd or 3rd gear. Once we blew the water out and tightened the connector, the problem went away. But, with these old hard-used Eucs, there were always more problems popping up.
The project manager called off the scraper spread the next day after watching a couple of rounds like mine. We held a "what the hell do we do now" meeting, and eventually decided to dewater the trench with pumps and continue with the scrapers. That's a story in it 'self………..
2 posts went up while I was typing my last one