7/3/2023 0 Comments Scoop shovel![]() "I'd seen pictures of Gophers before, but I didn't think any still existed." Then a friend told him about one he spotted in Vermont. He goes to six or eight vintage equipment shows a year, where he and his father bring out some of their favorite pieces.Īnother of George Marsh's favorites is this circa 1925 American Gopher crawler crane. He enjoys running and working on the old equipment and showing it. George MarshRegardless of its details and history, the Scoop Shovel ranks among his favorite finds, especially since there appears to be no others around anymore. “But I know it wasn't a lot, and not for a long time.”Ī photo from a Thew Shovel Company brochure shows a Lorain TL-25 crane with a Scoop Shovel loading blast furnace slag onto a truck. “I have no idea when they started building them. “But I haven't really been able to find anything with more specific details about that particular attachment. “They put that attachment in like every operator's book that they put out, as an option,” he says. It appears to play a similar role as a wheel loader does today. Many of the photos show it being used in mining operations. ![]() Marsh has found a Lorain sales brochure from the 1950s, which shows the Scoop Shovel. You can't boom that down and dig a trench with it, for example.” “It's tricky, because the normal cable shovel, you can really get behind your pile,” Marsh explains. Four levers are used to control the shoveling process. But it can work in spaces with low overhead, such as coal mines. The Scoop Shovel doesn’t have the digging power of a standard shovel. A standard shovel for a crane that size would have a ¾-yard capacity or so. The shovel’s capacity is about 2 cubic yards, which is typically found on a much larger machine. It extends out to about 20 feet high and is designed for higher capacity shoveling and unloading than typical cable shovels. Operating the shovel is also a little strange. “The way you’ve got to run it now is that you're pretty much always waiting for the bucket to either dump or to come back, because hydraulics is just slow on it,” Marsh says. He’s not exactly sure how it originally worked other than it likely had a trip bucket, in which the operator would pull the dipper trip to dump materials and then reset it. As a big fan of friction cranes, Marsh believes that has made it a slower machine. Somewhere along the line, hydraulics was added by a previous owner for the dumping mechanism. George suspects it was used in coal mines in Ohio, possibly for loading shallow cuts of coal into haulers. ![]() ![]() The seller knew the owner, who had recently passed away and was a coal stripper. Equipment WorldHardly anything is known about the Scoop Shovel, such as when it was built and how many were made. George Marsh in the operator's seat of his 1956 Lorain TL-25 crawler crane with Scoop Shovel at the HCEA convention in September in Bowling Green, Ohio. But I'd rather be able to get in it and use it.” “My thing is, I like my stuff to run 100%. He might paint it, but then again, that’s not as important. “I need to get some more things freed up on it. And since the show, hydraulic lines have sprung leaks, which he plans to fix. The Scoop Shovel still needs some work to run smoother, George says. The pulleys and cables retracted the boom as the shovel readied to scoop another load. The bucket dumped and reset using the hydraulics, which were added later. After the bucket was filled, the boom would swing out. The boom and bucket moved forward with pulleys and cables, sliding horizontally into the pile of dirt. “It hadn't run in a while when we got it,” George says.Īt the HCEA show, George demonstrated the Scoop Shovel by filling and dumping shovelfuls from a dirt pile.
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