Loading…

Went with a manual ladder dredge over a hydraulic one for the Clearwater job | Dredge Operators - SMM Buzz

Went with a manual ladder dredge over a hydraulic one for the Clearwater job

Everyone on the site said I was nuts. The project was a 3 month silt clearing job on the Clearwater River in Idaho. The foreman pushed hard for a modern hydraulic cutterhead dredge. Said it was faster. I argued for the old style ladder dredge with the chain of buckets. My call. The hydraulic rig would have cost us $12,000 more to rent for the season. But that wasn't the main thing. We had big, buried timber down there. Old log drives from a century ago. A hydraulic cutter would have just chewed those logs into a million splinters and jammed the pump solid. The bucket ladder? It just grabs the whole log and lifts it out. Clean. We lost maybe half a day of production total to pulling out twelve whole logs. No pump damage. No downtime. Sometimes the old way is the right way for the ground you're working. Anyone else ever go against the grain on equipment choice and have it pay off?

3 comments

3 Comments

henrycooper4mo ago

Nice! But that's a bucket-line dredge, not a ladder.

grace_allen4mo ago

Honestly @henrycooper, you're right and that mix-up happens all the time. I saw a guy at a show last year call a bucket-line a ladder dredge and the whole booth got confused. Tbh, the key is looking for the continuous chain of buckets, like a conveyor belt, versus the single line with a digging bucket on the end. Saves a lot of time when you're trying to look up parts or specs.

oliviagrant4mo ago

My uncle had a similar situation back in the late 90s on a reservoir job in Montana. Everyone was pushing for this new fancy GPS guided excavator setup but he stuck with a old dragline crane. Found a whole submerged car buried in the mud that would have wrecked the newer machine's sensors for sure.