H Series Cat scrapers

[Hollywood627G]

You normally load in second, but if you wait for the machine to shift down to 2nd, lock it in gear, then hook up is too slow. Use the cushion in the pushblock and stab your brakes to hook up smoothly and quickly and in a higher gear than 2nd, normally 3-4. You dont push in 3-4, unless in mud as previously stated, but it is quicker to hook up in those gears. If done correctly you scare the sh*t out of the lead hand because it looks like youre going to slam him, but really youre buttery smooth.

I didnt mean to just bomb the material in the fill, but 2-3 gear is to slow 95% of the time. Around here the super's will time you, and if you arent fully loaded in a certain time, youre off the machine. No skimming to clean up, you gotta learn to keep it clean while mucking. A 27 cant gouge 3 ft. holes, but it can take 12" out smoothly.

 

[BrianHay]

Maybe I am missing something. I can't see why waiting until I am ready to be pushed before pushing me is slow. I have my bowl in the ground starting my cut so it is easy for my partner to pace me....how can he not keep up with me when I am digging and he is not? If he comes right up behind pacing me, drops to second and keeps both throttles wide open then as soon as my cut starts to slow me down he has got my back and helping out nice and smooth without missing a beet or stabbing the brakes, should never need to hit the brakes unless it is an emergency or unforseen obstical...

 

[BrianHay]

...it all depends on the material you are working with. If the fill is kept neat and the material spreads well, by all means blow it out in eighth gear with your bowl high, I love those kinds of hauls. If it's chunky and you gotta shape it as you dump it, well every fill is different.

 

[vapor300]

Brian i agree with you 100% the 2nd scraper should have no problem catching the lead scraper if the lead scraper has already started cutting, If the lead scraper is in 2nd and the 2nd scraper is in 3rd or 4th trying to tag up, the lead scraper is going to feel it.

 

[Hollywood627G]

What happens when the lead scrapper hits a hard spot and stops before youre on him? You need to get to him before he starts cutting. Skimming a couple inches isnt cutting or digging. The lead scrapper should be DIGGING not Skimming as soon as his edge touches the ground. IDK about where ya'll are from, but around here 200 loads is a typical 10 hour day. Thats 33,000 yards in 4 days of shale and caliche. Production machines need to be moving dirt, not cleaning it up. My bale is comming down well before my pushblock touches his stinger, in 3-4 gear. If the lead scraper feels it then you did it incorrectly. Try it, youll see the lead hand pick up his can and try to get away from you because it looks like youre going to slam him, but youre actually really smooth and fast. I had to yellat my lead guy because he was picking up and running away afraid he was going to get slammed. It takes alot of guts and alot of trust to hook up this way. Its not hard on the machine either. Ive never needed a brake adjustment let alone my brakes replaced. And please dont fill with your can high, it makes the fill rough

 

[BrianHay]

It is really easy to tag another scraper in high gears. I often work were twins are mixed in with singles and help them down the haul road. Spent one season were the company had started upgrading from 31's to 37's. They traded 2 31's and the 10 for a pair of 37's and put hooks on the back of the two remaining 31's. I often tagged him in 6,7 8th gear going down the haul road to help him out. But when he got back to the cut I backed off and paced him until he was ready to be pushed.

I live in B.C now but spent about 20 years moving a lot of big dirt in Alberta, will probably be going back again in the spring. Maybe you and I are just thinking from two different positions. It has been a very long time since I have been up front with most of the pack bulking. I generally pick who I feel to be the best operator of the bunch or has the potential to become a really great operator and he or she falls back with me to clean up behind the bulkers. A good grader hand can work magic but not miricales, you gotta help him out some. I do what I do and at the end of the day my cut and fill are grade and my load count is no less than anyone else.

Sometimes I do dump with my bowl high. As I said every material is different. Chunky stuff you gotta drag it neat as you dump it. Sand or silt you dump it moving as fast as you can and don't touch it with your cutting edges. It will spread like water nice and neat. If you try drag dumping it at high speed you will bounce, duck walk and make a mess that only gets worse with each round until you slow rite down and drag it deep to fix it.

 

[vapor300]

200 loads a day is easy but you have to have the perfect conditions. Me and my partners best day was 219 but we also had to wheelroll are fill a few times. Most of the days we get around 175. But on most of are jobs the only support equipment we had was an 815, we cut all are slopes, subgraded all are roads, and put everything on grade with pair of 27's. I have yet to this day seen a pair of 27 hands that didnt need support equipment, but around here push pulling is a lost art.

But i still dont agree with tagin up in any gear higher then 2nd, just dont find it neceesary, its alot of unnecssary stress on the machine. And when i would start cutting i could cut up to a foot deep, but i could only do it for 10-15feet but, just about the time id start to spin my partner would tag up. Thats how its suppose to be.

 

[637slayer]

if you are waiting for your machine to downshift its because you have shifted from 3-2nd under the pressure of push pulling, too many times, now your machine dont shift rite, cat makes its scrapers to match perfectly in 2nd gear full throttle, while you are deciding what gear you want to be in, trying to hold it in third for the "momentum effect" the scraper in the front can only skim until he gets the power of 2nd then he can dig deeper, pretty soon your cut looks like a rollercoaster, then there is the stop when you shift, besides the lost 2 seconds you are taking the chance of getting a tire, at upwards of 6,000 a tire there is alot of money riding on the front guy lifting fast enough to compensate for the lull in power, you sound like your pretty slick at hooking up in 3-4 gear i guess when the guy in front messes up which will happen, its just numbers, its his neck that takes the beating, personaly if anyone is pushing me in third i just start digging let off untill i shift there machine into second then i really start digging, people who push in third usually think they are good enough to hold their machine in a gear without locking it in, so when i come out of the ground without letting off and the back guy lets off to hold it from shifting, and the slack yanks out of the bail i laugh all the way to the fill.

 

[Kman9090]

Yeah thats a good way to handle it. I ran back for my brother and I never hooked up in anything above 2nd. At times I would forget to hit the tranny lock and that sucked. If anything I'd hollar at him on the cb and have him do what you said and just let off til mine shifted back into 2nd. Also like you said if you are in 3rd your trying to play with the throttle to get hooked up when the back guy starts cutting. If its not perfect then you yank the heck out of the bail.

 

[Scrub Puller]

Yair...Fark!! you blokes make it sound complicated...it's only a bit of common sense and teamwork. I ran stiff hitch 27's when the rotten things first came out, can't recall no major issues...we sometimes had four hooked up to make it through the cut.

 

[BrianHay]

Something like this Scrub? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr8Nnfcw48A....we didn't really need four but it sure helped in the sand, was a lot of fun and got the dirt moving in a hurry too. We moved an awful lot of mud on other jobs in the same way too.

 

[Jabes42]

Getting back to the origins of this post...
Here is a video from the 2011 Con Expo unvieling the 621H, 623H, & 627H scrapers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EZnuiyoyX8

 

[mufasa]

Who ever generated the pictures is a simple graphics artist who does not have a clue what these machines look like in real life, probably has never seen one and would not know what it was if they did see one.

Greg, lets have a friendly wager then, I am betting this "graphic artist" is dead on with these renderings for the H-Series.

 

[Greg]

Looked to me like all they did was take the engine of the rear of the 627 to make a 621 and left everything else back there.

 

[637slayer]

did anybody sit in the h at the expo? i heard the lines were unreal, i watched the cat vid, push a button to load, then watch the screen sounds too easy.

 

[vapor300]

Why would you want to just push a button to load it? Thats half the fun, and i wonder how long it takes to load using that feature?

 

[627E master]

I didn't make it to conexpo this year. The whole reason i wanted to go was for the 627H. btw thanks to vantage tes for that vid he put up on youtube. But what I have learned about the H series and someone mentioned the bail on the 621... cat is actually trying to market the push pull on the 621 saying that it can lead to higher production not only be compatible with 627s on site, but essentially no more waiting in the cut for a push cat, just hook onto another 621 configured with p/p, i mean the damn things got 407hp now and with the redesigned bowl, apparently they are alot easier to load... smaller engines in the front, now a C-13 tier 4 final, and C-9 tier 4 final as well in the 627 rear @ 290hp. Some things I have noticed are different CH accumulators, similar to those on graders, 24yd heaped capacity bowl, grade control, outside mounted bowl cylinders, hyd tank replacement (similar to the old 631C's, 641, 651, 657B series and if im not mistaken the 651E and 657E's) which looks like it could cause issues working on them mechanically. and the bowl itself looks like and old komatsu ws-23 design. The cab features are not too bad from what I can tell, I'm a left footed operator so the placement of the pedals and steering wheel are a plus for me, however i got used to the wheel in the center because i would always line up my steering column with the middle of the tire tread for accuracy, I dont mind the 3 cameras... they are properly placed, even though i still like to do things old school. As for the auto load and dump feature, well, thats something that i would rather perfect myself as an operator, but for sticky outfits who expect full production out of green guys (or anyone), I think it can be a useful tool. Because I live in Alberta, plastic anything is a bad thing, try aluminum fuel tanks instead.... fenders i'm not sure of. Back to the cab, i think i could embrace the new dozer style lever. The overall look of the machine is modern, yet gives a retro feel, not quite sold on it. Cat has some improvements to make but overall I give the H series an 8 out of 10

 

[tireman]

When Peabody Coal Co. was building a new haul road and installing a conveyor belt line at their Lynnville Mine back in '97,a contractor from St.Louis had a gang of '31's & '37's down there and they were running 5 machine trains push/pulling together with '37's in front,middle & rear with 2 '31's in between(37,31,37,31,37).I was servicing the mine at the time and saw them going at it for a couple of months.

 

[vapor300]

Do you knoww the name of the contractor??? Only company i can think of from St. Louis that had that equipment was KOLB, but tthey didnt have a bail on the front or a hook on the back of the 31's???

 

[tireman]

It wasn't Kolb.I was the man who's service locked that account into the tire company they still deal with to this day(as far as I know).I remember one of the first service calls I went on for Kolb was to put a pair of new tires on the front of a "51 and move the fronts to the rear.The scraper was sitting by the highway and you couldn't see the job because it was back in the hills.Anyway,I neck-blocked the machine and changed one tire,then did the same and as I was working on the other front,the job super and operator come pulling up,get out and are walking around the machine scratching their head's and searching everywhere trying to figure out how I had the front off the ground with nothing underneath the machine(or parked on the tail).Less than two weeks later,they had quit calling the three other tire vendors they had been dealing with and would call my cell(not the shop) when they needed something.Great bunch of guys over there at that time.Anyway, I believe that the contractor was Friesen Bros.,if I'm not mistaken.Berra had some '31's back in the late 90's.They even bought some '51's in '98 after seeing what Kolb was doing with theirs.Howell & Sons out of Defiance also had a few old '31's that they bought in early '99.Funny thing though,I never saw any of Friesens equipment anywhere in St.Louis that I can recall,except maybe one of their trucks on the highways.Only place I saw (and serviced)their machines was at the Lynnville Mine.They were die hard Goodyear,and I even worked at Purcell in Fenton for a short while,and never even heard their name.Not sure what the story is,but I know they had a GANG of scrapers down there in Indiana on that job in the fall of '97.But,you are correct-no bails or hooks on any of Kolb's '31's.Nor on their 4 651's.