blog post stuff inside

[skyking]

No, it just happened to be with it for that picture. It is often the tug with that rig.
This custom unit is the most coveted tug in the fleet and hard to get.

It has an 11 ton boom truck crane welded to the deck, and twin 250 HP cummins engines. There is a big winch you see on deck to snug up a barge to the flat push front.

 

[brianmanahan]

with all these tugs we need @Texashiker in here

 

[BoomerD]

with all these tugs we need @Texashiker in here

why? He couldn't handle the work.

 

[Charmonium]

No, it just happened to be with it for that picture. It is often the tug with that rig.
This custom unit is the most coveted tug in the fleet and hard to get.

It has an 11 ton boom truck crane welded to the deck, and twin 250 HP cummins engines. There is a big winch you see on deck to snug up a barge to the flat push front.

Oh wow. It's so darling, like a little toy that wanted to be big.

 

[deadlyapp]

Thanks Boomer, the waterworks are great stuff. @deadlyapp , thanks for the work pictures. That second one with the late model Grove tubular boom is nice. The early Groves had trapezoidal booms and are also cool.
The first dispatch I got after the surgery was running a boom truck on a grain dock for an emergency repair. The boom truck maxed out the structural capacity of the dock, and was bull rail to bull rail with the main outriggers.
We were taking down this piece of heavy machinery that got bent up against a grain ship hold.
We took off the telescoping tube and then they lowered it down with chain falls till I could get over it with the hook and rigging.


It was much heavier than they said it was. This is always the case with crane work.
I could not boom down enough to set it behind the truck. The solution? Take down the boom rest, set it on the deck, and back up till I could unload it to the side.


I backed up and set up the crane on outriggers again, and then loaded it onto this poor hapless 1 ton flatbed.
I backed him right up into my outrigger pocket to stay in capacity.


They repaired it and stripped about 1500 pounds of hardware that was no longer used. It was a bit easier to put back up.

It was one of the larger cranes I've been around. Wild to me that the counterweights had to come in on their own set of four or so flatbed, just a single plate sitting in the middle of a 50ft truck.

 

[skyking]

I'm trying to get a side gig driving those crane parts. My job has been slow so I will put together something if I can. I also have all the certs, but this is fill in work.
The good part is many of the tower crane setups happen on the weekends. OT baby!

 

[skyking]

Oh wow. It's so darling, like a little toy that wanted to be big.

It's all about perspective. It is 51' long and 16' wide, and displaces 9 tons.

 

[skyking]

We had a deeper road repair at a slide chute farther down Stevens Canyon on the mountain job. They had originally done a fantastic buildup and wall construction with stacked blocks, but it needed drainage pipe installed beneath it all. That one we peeled apart with excavators and restacked, as it was a dry stack wall. We called it the Amphitheater due to the appearance of the massive lower layers and setbacks.
google map overview

We got that down about 32 feet below road grade, then I slid down in there with this 9 ton Volvo excavator and put in drains. The federal inspector emailed me this photo years later.

The big excavator is a 345 Cat. he had put the bucket on backwards and dipped the drain rock out of a dump truck, and then handed it down to me.

After we got the drain in, he flipped the bucket around, I hooked onto his bucket with mine and he assisted me out of there.
It is the way.

 

[skyking]

It would be a quick trip to the switchback below.

The amphitheater benches

My friend Mike of the Mountain

I think somebody's cremains were originally placed in that notch. This rock creation is virtually invisible to the park visitors, as it is steep up the hill above you on the switchback and out of sight as you drive by above.