Is that still a Ritchie Brother sticker?
Nice job "pool boy" err I mean Trent Guess you gotta make the first scoop count. Sure does stir things up a bit. Darn neighbor kids makin' a duky in the pool.
Well I have one that I bet nobody can top.
A few years ago, a guy I used to contract to for hydraulic repairs called me on a Saturday and asked me what I was doing, he wanted to know if I knew anything about planes, I said yes that I was going for my pilots licence at the time.
I rolled down to his shop, he had an old EX400LC that he had picked up at a RIchie Bros action. He had also flown out to Edmonton on a hunt for a plane prop. What he found at a scrap dealer was a 3 bladed prop from a DC3.
He wanted to remove the stick from the EX400 and build a mounting frame for a couple of hydraulic motors and this prop. This fellow was smart, he had built an empire out of making compost. He had a huge operation in the city that took all of the green waste and composted it in special windrows that he had designed, he was making a fortune because the regional powers were paying him 50 bucks a ton to take the greenwaste, he would compost it for 3 months and screen it and sell it back to everyone at 20 bucks a yard. At the time he had 2 EX700's a WA800 with a custom 100 yard bucket and a bunch of dresser 500 machines to move the compost from the windrow to the screen plant. His compost piles used to get so hot that they would ignite inside. So you can imagine the steam that would come off these things when they took bucket loads off.
Generally he would put one of the EX700's on the top of the pile and feed dirt into the massive buckets on the wheel loaders when they came up, with all of the steam generated he wanted to blow it away as his machine operators had had a few accidents with hitting each other. Thats where the EX400 came in with the DC3 prop.
I mounted two char-lynn 10,000 hydraulic motors with drive belts to a common shaft, the prop was on the common shaft. We disconnected the bucket hydraulic lines and used that oil to power the hydraulic motors, a bungie would hold the control over to continously feed oil to the motors.
This thing would blow your hat off at 50 yards, craziest thing you ever saw, but it worked. I had to install ball valves to prevent the lift cylinders from creeping down because if this thing ever hit the ground when it was running the scrapnel would have killed people.
I used to have pictures but I cant find them, you used to be able to see this thing from google maps too, but I think they have moved it.
I used to call it the flying excavator. Wish I could find those pictures tho. You probably dont believe me, but its got be around Vancouver somewhere.
They had some very beautiful young ladies operating some 844 deere loaders with gigantic buckets too!