Old International excavator still puts in a shift

by Nick Drew | Wed 10 Dec 2014

Old International excavator still puts in a shift

We have kindly been given permission to share some of Bert Baumgartner’s photos with the Digger Man Blog readership which feature his friend’s classic International 3964 excavator.

Bert is one of my latest Canadian contacts on the internet who hails from the Province of Manitoba in Canada, an area of the massive country that is famous for flooding and generally being bitterly cold in the winter, thanks in part to the cold weather that blows in off the Hudson Bay! Bert told me about his friend Grant, who owns a late 1970’s International 3964 excavator, which for its age is in great condition.

Grant bought the machine to replace his old Drott 40 Cruz Air American style wheeled excavator which he used for cutting pulp wood and loading logging trucks with. However the Drott could not cope with the frozen bush roads when they started thawing, forcing him to have to de-bog himself using the boom and dipper stick on a rather regular basis.

So the decision was made to purchase the tracked machine which was sure to offer better manoeuvrability in the soft ground conditions and he modified his existing pulpwood grapple to fit the International machine. Over the years the grapple has been beefed up considerably and Grant has even used it to dig with in the past!

Bert paid a visit to see Grant in the spring of last year and was told that his house had sadly been burnt down. With the heavy snow finally melting Grant was able to use the machine again to start cleaning up after the fire using the grapple to retrieve metal from the remnants of the building to sell for scrap.

Classic for their time, this machine looked and felt like playing a piano with all those different levers to contend with!

The International machines from this era were based on the French Yumbo design, a company who International owned from 1970 to 1982. The roots of the Yumbo designed machines can be traced back even further as far as the early 1950’s and the designs of the Italian Bruneri brothers from Turin, a family with a rich heritage in early hydraulic excavator design and technology. We thank Bert and Grant for sharing their photos with us here on the Digger Man Blog.

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