Veteran German Menck Gets a Helping Hand from a French Classic

A classic German Menck ‘scrapedozer’ that is being restored, recently received a helping hand from friend of the Digger Man Blog Dirk Bömer, operating a French built Poclain wheeled excavator.

Dirk has a lot of friends who are involved in a classic machinery club and they often help each other out with repair and restoration work. On this occasion Dirk was visiting a guy in Hamburg, who has been restoring a Menck SR53 scrapedozer which dates from the late 1950’s.

As you can see in the photo below, the machine was salvaged and loaded onto a truck several years ago, and the painstaking restoration job has been ongoing ever since. It was in a pretty bad way to start with but he is now nearing the completion of the job, complete with original blue paintwork.

During this visit Dirk was assisting the guy by lifting in the bowl apron, to do this job Dirk was using another classic in the form of a Poclain TX model. The TX was a 4x4 version of the famous TY45, it was aimed at the German market for those who as Dirk put it, “couldn’t make friends with the three-wheeled TY45”.

Dirk said that the controls on the TX model were typical of Poclain’s from that era with a vast array of levers to contend with, almost like playing a piano, with levers from left to right being bucket, swing, stick, and boom, all operated in forward and backward movement, quite tricky until you get your head around it.

These machines have a long history in the area, having been developed by Menck and Hambrock who were based in Hamburg, some of the first examples were developed for the German army as far back as 1939, with further upgrades in 1943.

There is only a really short poor quality clip of the machine coming out of the guy’s garage, but I have uploaded it to our You Tube channel anyway, which you can see below.