late 1970s, blue river oregon. Chris Shellabarber, Randy Woolwine, and myself embarking on a new business venture. Scraping wire rope from mines. First machine was an massive cutoff saw, with hydraulic dogs and rams to feed 2 wire rope into the blade. Second was a year later, we built a 300 ton hydraulic shear, then fabbed up a long logger with grapple and took the bunks, made them into the shear platform. What do you do when welding the shear body made from 2-4 thick steel and the welds start cracking right off the bat??? Heat it of course. We set it up on a bunch of rounds, started a fire under it and cooked it for about 3 hrs, then put on the leathers and started welding. Did all this work in a little lean to shed, at the site of an old mill just out of Blue River. You can see the conditions,,,,,, had mallards landing in the yard. McKenzie river was about 400yds south of us. The pic of Chris scratching his jaw, and me sitting with my hard hat on is right after we blew the shit out of a 24 abrasive wheel,,,, I mean exploded it! We all hit the deck when it went, then had to man up and come back in with the remnants still flying around like shrapnel to shut the thing off! Im sure Judy Shellabarger Gosnell remembers all this, she took alot of these pics. Great times, unfortunately not profitable for the investors,,,,, but thats the way it goes sometimes. We took the shear to wyoming and scraped out about couple hundred tons of 4 cable, rebuilt the hydraulic pump in the middle of a surface coal mine, wind and dust blowing around. Ah yes,,,,, to be young again........... Thanks Judy, great memories as well as some really nasty ones, but the good were better than the bad.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Nov 2014 02:58:23 +0000