Billhook

Glad to hear your warm comments Simon,I thought I was alone in my classic machine madness. The D7C is not fitted with the turbo of the D7D, but that is fine with me as I can do without dealing with a sixty year old turbo engine. I had a catastrophe when the Beast from the East hit us. Daisy Etta was in an open fronted shed surrounded by one ton boxes of wood and sheltered from the prevailing wind and the sky. I forgot to drain the water and the freezing temperatures cracked the block, the water pump and the starting engine cylinder head. My Fiat Panda was sitting outside on top of the hill fully exposed with no antifreeze and was unaffected. I had to send the old girl back to Robert Wilson for an expensive engine swap, ouch! But it is running a lot better than the old one and it is the only expense I have had in 20 years

We have several specimen trees in the old parkland which was ploughed up during the war for the much needed food for the nation My father kept all the major trees, oaks, ash, hornbeam, beech, chestnut and walnut which I had the pleasure of ploughing, cultivating, drilling and spraying and harvesting around for about forty years, but it all seemed worth it for the wonderful view. In this video an old rotten chestnut stump had sent up some suckers and a willow and thorn had grown together next to it. So Daisy Etta took them out and there is a beautiful hornbeam growing there now. F3B92C46-0A02-4EB5-B158-4F120924887F.MP4

Dangerous territory Sawchip! Have you not heard about the father who took his little daughter to the zoo where she became fascinated with the penguins . So for Christmas he bought her a book on penguins and after she had read it asked her if she had enjoyed it ” it was ok dad, but it told me more about penguins than I wanted to know!” of course there is my Avatar with the two wonderful Airedale’s helping me level the chalk roads on the farm. So a long Christmas shaggy Caterpillar story for you It all started back in the 1960s when my father bought me a book of science fiction short stories . One was called Killdozer by Theodore Sturgeon about a D7 which became overcome by an alien force which entered the very atoms of the machine and then proceeded to try and kill all the civil engineering crew on this island in the Pacific where the Americans were making a runway It was made into a film of the same name which was rather poor and featured a D9 not a D7 When the boss of the civil engineering team was asking the team who drove what, he came to a Mexican who said he drove Daisy Etta. The boss said that was cool because if a man called a machine a pet name then he was likely to care for it. “No, no “said the Mexican, “I drive de siete” which is of course Spanish for D7, but the original name stuck in the book, though of course they could not use it for the film. I bought it in 2000, it had been sitting on an airfield for many years and the story was that the head was cracked as it spewed out water. After buying it I discovered that the reason it was losing water was because someone had blocked up the pressure relief valve with silicone There was no starting engine, just a not very well engineered electric starter which was useless. I asked father and son team Robert and Allan Wilson to find one and they put me right from the start I had already bought some high quality bolts to fix the new donkey on the block but they refused to use them as they were not Caterpillar bolts They then showed me the difference. The Caterpillar heads were about one and a half times deeper but more than that every bit of steel on the D7 has to meet the Caterpillar standard which is why these machines last so long It is a 1956 D7 C. 17A with hydraulics as opposed to cable. The blade had three positions which are easily adjusted by hand as the blade of perfectly balanced There is a two speed gearbox with the donkey/ pony starting engine which is a twin cylinder petrol of about 1400 cc which shares its water with the main 13.5 litre four cylinder diesel. This engine produces maximum power at about 1000 rpm and it has a decompression lever above the high/ low gearbox lever on the donkey The idea is that in Artic conditions, when the oil is cold and thick, you can run the donkey with the main engine decompressed until the oil pressure is normal and then temperature is up. The exhaust of the donkey heats the inlet manifold which is clever. The donkey is strong enough to lift the blade and move the crawler on level ground The Hyster winch has about a thirty to pull In the picture with the levers, the far right is the blade up and down, then the forward reverse, the the five gears. Two hydraulic assisted steering clutches with brake pedals below for turning on a sixpence The main throttle in the centre back to increase forward to idle. The main hand clutch lever then the two winch levers, the nearest is the brake and the other the forward/ neutral/ reverse. Here is a video of spooling a new winch cable on the drum using the Matbro as a dead weight to keep it tight. Warned you it might be more than you wanted to know! 3FC41ABC-BD3B-4A64-82D2-5423F6E56644.MP4

Winch limits both visibility and fitting a plate, also the whole machine is designed for pushing and I rather think reverse gear ratio is higher than forward ratio.

Very interesting reading and thanks for the link We will be probably burnt at the stake for questioning this new religion when the inquisition comes along. If David Attenborough is forced to lie about walrus deaths then we know it is political

Like I said, stop the ones breeding that eat manufactured sugar.

Airlines legally liable for burns caused by spilled coffee, rules ECJ WWW.TELEGRAPH.CO.UK Airlines are legally liable for harm caused by the accidental spilling of hot drinks, even if the mishap was not caused by... I can now put on some thick underwear, pour hot coffee over my leg, photograph the damage when I have arrived at my hotel room after hiding the red paint pot out of view and claim for the cost of the flight and probably the holiday too. I am glad that we are coming back to British laws after January. It has been honed over centuries, it may not be perfect, but it is better than all the others.

Just as Peterson said

I have said it before, but the elephant in the room is overpopulation. Think of the carbon footprint of each individual and you realise that 8 billion people is unsustainable and it needs to be reduced to about 2 billion. The only way I can think of doing it without a war or dictatorship, is to put an infertility drug into manufactured sugar. This may solve two problems at once.

Jordan Peterson has a way of telling it like it is.

Had another go earlier today to just try and re-split the larger piece from the first attempt. Because I could not see what was happening and the mud did not help and I stupidly did not wait for someone to watch for me, the piece of timber slid sideways and pushed on the right side of the horizontal knife. This knife is held in position by two half inch thick pieces of three inch wide steel and the force of the dozer bent them slightly, which demonstrates the power of the forces involved

I would agree with all your theories , but I was very surprised to see how easily the D7 performed compared to the six or seven ton Matbro. which has a very powerful telescopic boom, and even when I rammed it into the trunk nothing happened. I would have thought that the Matbro would have generated several tons of ram power on paper but it came to nothing in the actual test.

The Nebraska test would have been on full throttle in first gear, I was only on quarter throttle in the video

Drawbar pull in the Nebraska test was 26,286 lbs or 11.73 tons Drawbar hp was 103 The basic tractor weighs 14.22 tons dry to that has to be added the dozer blade and C frame 2.5 tons. the hydraulic system and two large rams 1.0 ton the heavy underbody protection and grill must be 0.5 ton The Hyster D7N winch and cable 2750 lbs plus cable about 1.5 tons Must be approaching 20 tons with fuel oil and water. But I cannot see how the pull test equates to the push test where you have all that weight and power concentrated on a small area. The drawbar test I would have thought is more about power and traction The PSI with the dozer pushing must be huge.

Always good to hear the other side rather than the indoctrination in the media

Just as a matter of interest, how is the pressure of a hydraulic ram splitter measured. Is there an industry standard or do you just estimate. And how do you measure the splitting power of a kinetic splitter, or one which uses a mechanically driven fine thread , Then of course there are the screw thread cone splitters. So how would you measure the splitting power of Daisy Etta as it is obviously more than just the 20 ton weight of the tractor?

And it is still wet on the main farm track!

Praise indeed especially when you consider what many find pleasing on the internet! This is only the first phase just to see if the principle works. Daisy Etta hardly noticed the tree in front of her . Things will progress when it dries up a bit and I have somebody operating the Matbro and guiding me with hand signals. Not quite sure where to put the two ropes Mark!

Latest modification four way splitter. Tried it on a horrible gnarly sycamore trunk. Things would go a lot better when (if) it dries up a bit but I would call it successful and the four pieces should go through the Palax processor now.

Just to show how wet it is. The clay soil is so sticky that it fills up the tread and makes the tyres like slicks Much better to be the camera man in these situations! Shown this before last time it was wet, so even 6x6 with good tyres on the flat can be in trouble

You beat me to it! It was not me who needed the mask, it was my mate behind on the quad!

Not sure what I did wrong with the video above the first one refused to upload and I cannot delete it or write a message The second one should show the capability of the XC70 in the mud the poor old thing needs a few new filters and a bit of TLC I took the car down hill to service the JCB digger thinking that I would need to fetch the Ford 8210 tractor to tow it back. i asked my mate to follow me down in his new Honda Quad to take me back to the tractor when we arrived at the JCB after an easier trip than I thought , he bet me £10 that it would not make it back up the hill. This was too much to resist and you can hear him chuckling as the Volvo goes sideways. The beer tasted good at the pub later on!

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I think one of the main reasons that the ride is so good on the early cars is that they had sensible 60 series tyres and not stupid low profiles. The other reason for choosing the earlier model is because it just looks like an ordinary estate car and is not made to look more aggressive like the later cars which are a bit in yer face , so people are not so wound up about them as they can be about big 4x4s., not saving the planet and all that.

Oh Joy!!! Just managed to find one half dry day to rescue the old girl before it slowly sank into the mire. Managed to drive the Matbro up to it with gear difficulty and extend the boom to lift the track over the idler. I would have used the bucket if I was on some dry level ground and we could put logs under the chassis to left the track off the ground. Of course every time we tried the 15 tons of machine just pushed the logs further into the mire. Anyway track back on, ditching finished, Matbro pushed itself out of the mire with the teleboom, all back at the yard now, oiled and greased as a reward, on top of this, a good election result, just been to a very romantic Christmas family Wedding with everyone in great form, so now looking forward to Christmas Day and I hope it will be a good one for all of you!