by Nick Drew | Thu 05 Jan 2017
The final death throes of an excavator
I recently made contact with a guy called Martin Grant, who originally hails from New Zealand, but now lives in Sydney in Australia. He has kindly shared some photos of what looks like a sad end for a large Komatsu excavator.
These days Martin Grant works in the crane and rigging industry, but he does have a background with earthmoving equipment. After leaving school he got a job driving an old Road Marshall roller, then ended up operating a Gradall excavator, and a really old Hitachi excavator, before moving on to a Caterpillar 977 traxcavator. His interest in plant has never faded though, and as a very keen photographer and contributor to a trucking and heavy haulage magazine, he is often out snapping shots of heavy kit at work in the Sydney area where he lives.
He recently came across a site which is located just five minutes away from the Central Business District of Sydney not far from the world famous Opera House, where a large Komatsu excavator was meeting its maker, succumbing to the flames of the dreaded “gas axe”. In these first couple of shots we see the burner cutting through the base of the boom.
And here with the help of a Sumitomo SH240 the boom is being unceremoniously ripped off before further torch work commences.
There are no real details on just why this excavator was being cut up, even though it is an old machine, one would think it would still have had some value in it if it was a “runner” which would have enabled it to be sold on. Maybe there was simply more money to be made from its scrap value, either way it’s a sad sight to see what was more than likely the pride of the fleet back in the day.
In this last shot we see what’s left of the machine in its final death throes. No doubt this metal will be shipped off to China and later sold back to us as new machinery in the future!
Talking to Martin about why there is such big machinery in a city location like Sydney he said, “Sydney is built on sandstone, which is hard as nails, so they need big kit here to deal with it. There is a big Caterpillar D11 dozer not far from here at the moment, in a 150 x 70m hole just ripping all day long, and this is not an uncommon scenario around these parts”.
We thank Martin for sharing these photos and look forward to seeing more of Martin’s work here on the Digger Man Blog.