RayGo Giant Classic Photos Unearthed: #ThrowbackThursday

Our American friend Steve Kole has recently posted another series of previously unseen photos on his Facebook page, this time featuring a visit he made to the RayGo Equipment Inc, factory field day event in 1977.

We have featured the RayGo "Giant" here on the Digger Man Blog on numerous occasions previously but when rare images like these crop up, its a great opportunity to re-visit the topic.

Steve took these photos during his time as a Field Salesman for Waukesha-Pearce Industries (WPI) based in Houston, Texas. Apparently, Steve and a group of other WPI employees had flown up there for the event in the company plane.

The RayGo “Giant” was something of a beast in the grader world with an operating weight of 106,000lbs. It featured double articulation and was powered by two 318hp GM Detroit Diesel engines driving single axles fore and aft.

This machine was really designed for heavy duty work in the mining industries, tending tip areas during surface mining reclamation and haul road maintenance. Its massive blade didn’t feature all the positioning options of more mainstream graders, as such the concept didn’t really catch on.

According to one commentor, Larry Dunlop, the RayGo Giant had been originally developed by a contractor by the name of Ken Harris. He developed it from various Euclid scraper parts. RayGo then bought the rights from Mr Harris to produce the Giant.

On the subject of how many were built, another commentor Gary McClay who worked for RayGo for 43 years said, “I believe we built 7 of them, I drove the last one onto a rail car for shipment, the one in these photos has the 24’ sliding blade on it”.

RayGo was more well known for self-propelled compactors, I recall seeing a single drum vibratory roller on for Laing’s during construction of the M27 motorway in 1973/4, but another machine I had not seen before was the RAM 65 sheep foot compactor seen below.

RayGo which had been established in 1964 finally ceased to be in 1985 when the CMI Corporation purchased the business, with rights to the RayGo products eventually going to Caterpillar Inc in 1987.

We thank Steve Kole for sharing these photos and some of the information contained in this blog post. All photos are credited to Steve Kole.