Steve Kole’s Mining Memories (Clark-Michigan 380)

For this blog post we delve once more into our American friend Steve Kole’s extensive photo archives, and on this occasion focusing on the rubber tyred Clark-Michigan 380 dozer.

As previously mentioned in earlier posts, American heavy equipment man Steve Kole’s, job role with the Texas Utilities Mining Company (TXU), involved him looking for new equipment to improve productivity and efficiency in the mine.

Talking about the deployment of this dozer back in 1977 Steve said, “While I was working for Waukesha-Pearce Industries (WPI), we put a Clark-Michigan 380 wheeled dozer, fitted with a Semi-U blade and a 3-shank ripper in on demo and demonstrated it in three of the TXU Mines for a total of 600-hours on the hour meter.

This was done free of charge to see if the machine could push like a conventional tracked crawler dozer. The 380 performed fine when working on cleaning off the top of the coal seam, working on the coal storage pile and in dozing fly or bottom ash.

Where it did not perform as needed was in dozing soil during soil reclamation operations.

The machine worked very well on a surface such as coal and ash where it could achieve ideal traction, where it did not perform well was where the ground surface was uneven such as in rough terrain which prevented the machine from achieving constant wheel traction”.

We thank Steve Kole for sharing these awesome historical photos with us here on the Digger Man Blog.

Checkout this video footage courtesy of PCS FAB You Tube channel, featuring a surviving Clark-Michigan 380 dozer still operating in 2017.