by Nick Drew | Wed 30 Sep 2020
Classic Wabco Scraper Keeps the Lime Moving
Lasse recently took another trip up to the lime quarry which is situated in Aalborg in the north of Denmark, as he had heard that there is now only one of these classic old scrapers left in operation. “This could be one of the last chances that I would get to see her in action, so I had to take a day off work to go up and see her” said Lasse.
The big 1000hp twin 12V-71T Detroit Diesel powered Wabco 333 FT elevating scraper with ripper, is now the only surviving Wabco on the site, the quarry still has two other non-working units, which are being used as donor machines to keep this last old girl going, but according to Lasse most of the components have now been used up.
Apparently the plan is to keep running her for as long as they can, but inevitably she will end up going for scrap along with the remaining parts of the donor machines.
The quarry has recently purchased a Cat 632G to replace the ageing Wabco, which you can see at the end of Lasse’s video, it is a lot smaller and only a single engine, but sadly Cat don't want to make another twin engine elevating scraper.
Wabco (Westinghouse Air Brake Co) were keen promoters of the elevating scraper concept throughout the 1960’s & 70’s. One of their largest models was indeed the aforementioned 32 cubic yard, 333FT. It was only superseded in size by the 353FT, which was introduced in 1977 and had a 36 cubic yard bowl capacity. Sadly, heavy operating costs on the big elevating scrapers saw sales drop off dramatically, signalling the end of Wabco’s involvement in scraper manufacture.
Checkout Lasse’s video of the machine in action, taken using his new DJI Mavic Mini Drone.
We thank Lasse for sharing his material here with us on the Digger Man Blog.