Golden oldies spotted

by Nick Drew | Wed 25 Feb 2015

Golden oldies spotted

Digger Man Blog reader Karsten Beckman has kindly sent in some photos of old kit he has spotted on his travels around the South East of England recently.

It’s always a pleasure to receive reader’s photos to post in a genuine blog as opposed to them being posted on our Facebook page, where after a few days they slip down the list of topics and often never get seen again. This is why I prefer to use reader’s content on the blog where the topic can be easily found via a search engine in the future. Karsten works for as a customer support representative so gets around a bit meeting customers and offering his wealth of knowledge on his company's machines. As previously mentioned he does come across a wide variety of old kit “at rest” and in this blog I present a selection of some of his finds. First up is this classic JCB 3CII model which is in excellent condition for its age. The machine is parked up in a yard behind a more modern example from the JCB stable an 8 tonne class 8080 midi excavator.

Karsten spotted this ageing Bray wheeled loader fitted with a muck fork at rest undercover in a barn. Although getting on in life the machine appears to be well shod with decent tyres all round, making me suspect she still does a bit from time to time.

A selection of classic plant shots would not be complete without a British built Hymac 580C. Once the standard choice of excavator in the UK, Hymac built 5,600 of these machines from 1970 to 1981. To this day there are still many of these venerable old girls working on farms, scrapyards and on small self-build projects, not only in the UK but internationally as well.

So far in this selection the machines featured have all been British manufactured, but the remaining photos feature machines built by American giant Caterpillar. This Cat dozer is possibly a D7E. In decent condition it does look like it has been stood for some time.

In what appears to be the same barn another Caterpillar machine is this 931B crawler loader. First introduced as far back as 1972, this B series model would have been an upgraded model which was launched in 1979. Powered by a Cat 62hp diesel engine the standard machine carried a 1 cubic yard bucket and weighed in at around 14,800lbs.

This Caterpillar rear dump model which I believe was called a PR-21 is gradually being buried under a pile of hardcore and overgrowth! These machines were produced by Caterpillar before they entered the off highway truck business in a big way. The machines were based on a front mounted 621 scraper tractor, with the dump body section being manufactured by the Athey Corporation.

We thank Karsten for sharing his photos with us here on the Digger Man Blog and remind readers that if you would like your photos and information immortalised in a genuine blog post, please drop me a line at nickydrew16 at btinternet.com using the usual @ email format.

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