Bucyrus-Erie 50-B Steam Shovel - Part 1 of 4 - Sept. 2000

This is the 50-B that is now at Rollag.

The shovel had been thoroughly overhauled by its previous owner, but then the old operator retired. None of the younger operators wanted to mess with it, so it sat for many years until Belleview Sand & Gravel bought it and brought it back to life.

Contrary to the title on the video, this was apparently not the first operation.

Also seen is Belleview's rare Linn halftrack dump truck.

The first half of Part 1 is shot from the ground, the second half is onboard. It's a brutal machine.

Part 2 is entirely onboard, Part 3 is a mix of outside and onboard, and Part 4 is tramming it back to the shop.

Controls are more or less to Bucyrus-Erie standard. Swing on the left, pulled or pushed in the direction of swing, crowd in the center. You can see the linkage to the crowd engine on the boom. Hoist is from the ceiling, and is a 4-way lever. Forward is hoist, back lowers the bucket on air compression, ie a Jake Brake. Moving the lever to the side declutches the hoist for fast gravity lowering.

At 14:58 and following, this is the main hoist. The big bull gear is driven by the hoist engine. There are 2 frictions next to the bull gear. The one closest to the gear is the hoist clutch, the one further away is the brake. Note that most of the time, the clutch is kept engaged for power lowering.

It travels on the hoist. Since compressing air is useless for propulsion, there is a secondary control lever that allows powering in either direction. Steering is done by a ground man levering dog clutches on the sprocket shafts in and out.

Controls appear to be very light, as all levers are just throttles controlling the 3 independent motion engines. Thus it shouldn't be too tiring to run, except for the vibration.

This was an open house, not an HCEA convention, as that was held in Seward, Nebraska in 2000. We were at the great 1994 convention at Belleview, and probably have some Hi-8 video from it.

My recollection is that at the 1994 HCEA convention, this 50-B was a static display near the shop, with the bucket chained in the air. Great to see that they got it going.

This video was shot with a Sony Handycam in Digital 8. This format used 2 hour Hi-8 analog videotapes, running at 2x speed, to produce high quality 1 hour digital video. It was a revolutionary format at the time, and was used extensively by news media for field news gathering, such as in Iraq. A bit of image quality is lost in the MS moviemaker editor, losing some of the striking immediacy of the format. Note that it is interlaced, and sized for broadcast televisions of the time.

This is the first video from a large box full of 75(!) of these 1 hour tapes, that WurliTzer153Duplex is gradually converting via FireWire. These were shot by both of us, with several cameras, and it's interesting to figure out who did what.

There is some cool stuff in there.

#569
Belleview Sand & Gravel,
Petersburg, Ky
September 2000

Sony Handycam Digital 8
20000923d 50 B Part1