Memory of the month the way things were (Part Twelve)

Continuing with our monthly installment of memories from retired plant man William Peters, told in his own words and supported with photos from “Bill's” historical archives. 

The Plympton Bypass 2

When the Hough H400 loader arrived it was minus the cab and as I was loading small blue shillet stone. At the time I began to suffer a lot of small cuts to my face and arms this was caused by the fast tipping of the material into the dumpers rapidly displacing a large volume of air and sending small pieces of sharp shillet flying through the air towards the machine, I was much relieved when the cab eventually arrived.

Everything was not perfect with this machine however and there were four areas that could be improved, one was the shape of the bucket as it was a bit too low on the back which allowed stones to come over the back and run down the wide lift arms hitting the cab requiring constant vigilance on my part to avoid a broken windscreen, luckily I was able to convince Horace to get fitter Nick to make a spill board about a foot high, this fixed the problem and this also had the benefit of increasing the bucket capacity by a cubic yard, an excellent improvement and easily handled  by the machine, it also had a spade nose bucket with no teeth which is not really ideal for digging out rock, several years later teeth were fitted and made a big difference.

The machine also had an electro pneumatic system that automatically applied the brakes when the machine changed direction from forward or back, this was a real pain as it took about three seconds to release the brakes wasting a great deal of time every hour, enough to load another dumper at least, nor was it a smooth operation as it was hard to synchronize the throttle when you don’t know exactly when the brakes are being applied or released, luckily I discovered a way of overriding the system which led to smoother faster gear changes and quicker loading, humans are much better at that sort of thing. The third thing was that it was fitted with a GM engine and was under powered by about fifty horse power meaning that when a full bucket was being raised forward speed dropped to about half so the only way around this was to mitigate it with good operating practices, this engine had already been discontinued in favour of a better Cummins motor which was uprated to 590hp on the model C, I later discovered that it took twenty horsepower just to run the fan.

Another dumper was hired in, a Michigan T65 this proved not successful as the gross weight was about a hundred tons and basically the haul roads couldn’t support It, the front wheel just sank in and the load had to be tipped off to get it out, a good quarry truck but a waste of space for earth moving.

Come the end of September the rains set in as usual and most of the earthmoving ceased but bridge works etc continued. Three of the hired 35 ton dumpers were going back to Cripps being driven back with a police escort, the police stopped the traffic in both directions in order for the trucks to pull out onto the A38, as they started to pull out onto the road a Triumph herald convertible over took the whole row of traffic coming from the opposite direction and crashed at speed into the front of the leading dumper hitting the belly plate and going under the front axle, instant death for the driver and you can imagine the state of the car.  The poor dumper driver could do nothing but watch it happen as he hadn’t even managed to get fully off site, he was a tough nut but he had to helped out of the truck and was really shaking, as would we all  and a sad job for everyone.

There was an area of limestone at one point that jutted out about eight feet above where the finished road bed would be so Horace applied for a blasting licence for me and after a police interview it was granted, I spent a couple of months I drilling and blasting it ready for the spring push, I also came across a large piece of black rock totally different to the surrounding limestone and anything I’d ever seen in Devon, I wondered how it got there and breaking a small piece off I discovered it was about 50% iron pyrites, this was totally alien to the area and could only have been brought there by ice or a major flood millions of years ago, I still have that small piece in my garden, The co-operator