The Classic Machinery Network

FOWLER MAN wrote:Hi All,
I haven't posted on this thread for a while but I came across this pic. which took me back to a past age.
Don't know if this is classic plant or vintage like me. But I remember watching this duo work circa 1957/8 at a local cement works quarry.
The shunting loco was then about five or six years old and built by John Fowler of Leeds. It was powered by the same Meadows 6DJ970 engine that Fowlers used in the Challenger 4 crawler.
Surprising to me, (having been brought up to believe that British Engineering was supreme and nothing else was any good), was the electric powered face shovel. It was made in Germany by Menck & Hambrock. It was apparently a pre-war machine dating back to the 1930s and had, at the time, already given over twenty years service.
Fred

Hi Fowler Man,

thank you very much for your post on this picture. I always thougt of the UK as one of the leading shovel manufacturing countries in Europe - well, see this especially for the first half of the 20th century, like it is shown in the documentary "Teeth Of Steel". So I am quite surprised, too, to see this Menck working in a British quarry in the 50ies. Not from a technical view, because these shovels oud reach over 40 years of working life.

I was courius if I could determine the type of shovel depictured. I was browsing through mich archive and I'm pretty shure that this machine is a Modell E, also called ME. Which is quite nice, too, because just 25 were ever produced. Weighing 350,000 pounds, the ME had a 4.3cy bucket and 516 HP combined. Very sturdy and high undercarriage, and the upper works were armored with 1cm steel plates. Tuff shovel, nice find!

Cheers,

Max

Hi All,
I thought I'd like to share a few great pics and some of my early memories with you.
I have been trying to date the first picture of a Willment Bros. site in London. The navvy in centre stage provides the clue. It's a 54 RB and I am reliably informed that the third 54 RB to be produced by Rustons Serial No.7990 was delivered to Willment Bros. in 1943 and my gut feeling is that the pic. dates from 1946/7.

The 54 would have been powered by the legendary Ruston 5VCBN and if you look at the pic. you can see the five individual straight through exhausts sticking through the roof. I loved to watch these at work, particularly when the engine slowed down under load , you could almost hear every cylinder firing and at dusk the roar would be accompanied by a tongue of flame from each pipe.
I believe the other two navvies are Ruston 21Bs which were produced till about 1938 and if you think the bonneted tippers look ancient, they are Leylands like the ones the local council used circa 1946 when I was often late for school watching the steam rollers firing up in the mornings.
! can't identify the forward control tipper, they all looked so alike.

Fred

FOWLER MAN wrote:Hi All,
I thought I'd like to share a few great pics and some of my early memories with you.
I have been trying to date the first picture of a Willment Bros. site in London. The navvy in centre stage provides the clue. It's a 54 RB and I am reliably informed that the third 54 RB to be produced by Rustons Serial No.7990 was delivered to Willment Bros. in 1943 and my gut feeling is that the pic. dates from 1946/7.

The 54 would have been powered by the legendary Ruston 5VCBN and if you look at the pic. you can see the five individual straight through exhausts sticking through the roof. I loved to watch these at work, particularly when the engine slowed down under load , you could almost hear every cylinder firing and at dusk the roar would be accompanied by a tongue of flame from each pipe.
I believe the other two navvies are Ruston 21Bs which were produced till about 1938 and if you think the bonneted tippers look ancient, they are Leylands like the ones the local council used circa 1946 when I was often late for school watching the steam rollers firing up in the mornings.
! can't identify the forward control tipper, they all looked so alike.

Fred

You had the love of it at an early age Fred just like me and like many others who love plant and construction equipment.

Jeremy

Hi all,
Following the interest in the Smith Crane pic. posted in "Classic pictures updated" I thought I'd do some research.
In answer to Pete's question on all up weight , it was 22 tons and the max. lift capacity was 12 tons. It could also be rigged with up to 90 ft. of jib.

Smiths introduced the crane in 1946 and it was, as I thought, based on the 5-20 excavator. It did have a Fowler Sanders engine, a 5 cylinder unit of about 60 hp. which powered the crane through a fluid flywheel. It had two drums so could also be used as an excavator.

The chassis was anything but a standard Foden DG as it was made, by Fodens, from 18 inch RSJs

The odd cranked jib configuration in some of the pics. is a result of introducing a pair of links into the top to lower the head for transport.
It's great what you can find out if you know where to look. It's all available on line at "The Engineer"
You will probably have to enlarge the pics to read the text.

Thanks Fred I am not at all surprised that the Foden chassis was purpose built the visual look of the crane is huge compared to the truck it is mounted on, reckon it would have crushed a standard chassis.

Jeremy

That picture of the John Willment site in London is just so atmospheric of the time. I was living in London in the late fifties and even then similar sites were quite common as whole areas of war damage were still being cleared up and rebuilt. Contrast that with an image taken and posted on the Dover Sea Forum last week.

The Foden Crane must have been great fun when coming up to built up T junctions with 15ft of jib sticking out ahead of you!

XS650 wrote:The Foden Crane must have been great fun when coming up to built up T junctions with 15ft of jib sticking out ahead of you!

Or following tall vehicles surely they took that part of the jib separately? They must have unbolted it surely because if you were driving through a twisty lane with it you'd spear on-coming traffic with the jib oops

Jeremy

Jeremy Rowland wrote:

XS650 wrote:The Foden Crane must have been great fun when coming up to built up T junctions with 15ft of jib sticking out ahead of you!

Or following tall vehicles surely they took that part of the jib separately? They must have unbolted it surely because if you were driving through a twisty lane with it you'd spear on-coming traffic with the jib oops

Jeremy

Not quite straight forward as the Construction and Use Regs of the day insisted that if anything was unbolted from an "indivisible" load it had to be carried on a separate vehicle . Consequently it was quite common for anything up to 22RB size to be carried on a Knock Out Back Axle (KOBA) low loader (no removable swan necks in those days.) with the jib over the units cab and the bucket still rigged .
Once outside the C&U regs (32 tons gross) and into Special Types it was a paperwork nightmare with applications to the then Ministry of Transport , local councils , GPO and uncle tom cobley and all! No STGO 1,2 and 3 in those days.
I used to route plan for a lot abnormal loads around the Metropolitan Police area , Greater London and the home counties and one soon learnt not to trust any of the A-Zs and road atlases of the day to so say whether a road went over or under a rail line!!

Jeremy Rowland wrote:Thanks Fred I am not at all surprised that the Foden chassis was purpose built the visual look of the crane is huge compared to the truck it is mounted on, reckon it would have crushed a standard chassis.

Jeremy

The all up weight was only 22tons, not too bad for an 8 wheeler. Looks like the axles are non standard? Perhaps the reduction type?