Do you think he's done this before?

Anyone who likes that - may not have seen this:

The event where we met him? I bought SWMBO 'JCB racing' as a present one Christmas. This was before Diggerland (same people) existed.

Similar thing, but with larger equipment!

No video, but I came home one day to find my neighbour (who collects bulldozers - yes, really) had lifted one of them off the ground at one end with a JCB telehandler (*) and crawled underneath to remove a part. I subsequently asked what the SWL of the telehandler is (1.5 tonnes) and what the bulldozer weighed (not sure, but about 10 - 15 tonnes.)

There's a reason that farms are a dangerous place. Farmers are idiots.

(*

The combines were smaller when I worked on a farm in school holidays so we didn't have that problem. Machinery to lift stacks of bales was fairly recent though. About 1am we had almost finished and there was only one stack left in the field and both trailers were full. You pick it up and bring it back the farmer said. I had to raise the load so the tractors headlight (one was always bust) would shine under along the road. Forgot about the phone lines, which parted with a twang being the old individual copper ones. The Farmer was very worried of the consequences not from Post Office telephones but from his inlaws whose house the wires served. They hated each others guts and no opportunity was ever missed to declare a war. So at about 3am after a very late supper I found myself up a ladder lashed to the lade of a trailer with some choc block connectors,ceramic back then, and a screwdriver . Either side was the farmer and the other worker also on ladders who held the wires while I tightened the screws. They lasted till the copper was replaced.

G.Harman

He used to get out of the cab and carry them over the combine as it drove along by itself.

When we had the poles replaced, I asked if we could have taller ones, and the 'leccy company obliged.

May have done it anyway before too long, there has been a rolling program over the past decade or so to raise the height of electric wires due to the increased size of agricultural equipment. For some reason though the associated equipment such as Pole mounted transformers seem to be lower. May be it is an optical illusion because the poles are taller and /or the transformers are bigger but walking past one the other day the HV bushings looked well within hedge cutter range.

G.Harman

In message , Huge writes

It is just that there are more opportunities to do silly things:-)

Umm.. a hand held pitchfork? Alternatively, driver stands on cab roof leaving machine to mind itself for a bit?

regards

The latter.

When I was much younger my foreman was using a traxcavator to load a lorry and ferry soil back to the other side of disused RAF Kenley, where I was working. At lunch time he duly brought the lorry back with the last load and we broke for lunch. After we'd eaten I offered him a lift back to fetch the digger, so he could grade the heaps, he said no worries it was on its way back. Sure enough it tracked down the runway and missed us buy a hundred yards or so. He clambered aboard via the the moving tracks and we carried on.

Next day at lunch time a plane landed!

AJH

:-)

Not unusual. There is no *dead man's handle* on my vintage of harvester. More usually done with overhanging tree branches.

Apart from steering, all the controls are *stay where set* and require action from the driver to change.

regards