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| Started By | Thread Subject | Replies | Last Post | ||
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| ferrology | Blasting Snow | 4 | Dec 29 2007, 7:48 PM EST by PlowBoywinger | ||
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Thread started: Dec 28 2007, 12:28 AM EST
Watch
Yes, they blasted snow, highway crews used to be free and easy with the dynamite, farmers too. My father an dhis cousins used to throw rocks at a milk can built into a stone wall on his uncle's farm where the dynamite wa skept. Of course it's the caps that were dangerous, there was a famous logging camp supt. up in the Adirondacks with a short temper who lost it for the last time when he got mad and threw down a whole box full of caps. My great uncle, Deforest Holdridge worked as a "powder mokey" for contractor Louis B. Mayersohn out of Albany, NY who was the low bidder on many hard rock highway jobs in Upstate NY 1940's-1950's, and when he was a highway supt. later on he would pull out a knife and whittle on a stick of dynamite just to make people nervous. His employees didn't understand the concept of "mud capping" and after blasting all the dirt out from under a tree stump shoved in a full box, just as my great uncles were coming back from lunch they came up over the hill and swore that maple tree stump just hovered a hundred feet or so in the air, the blast reputedly broke all windows within a mile. Anyhow, the problem with snow is the thick ice crust that developed, forming huge cakes which would collapse in on the machine (second photo from top).
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| ferrology | Maine snowplows | 5 | Nov 16 2007, 9:37 PM EST by Anonymous | ||
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Thread started: Oct 20 2007, 10:36 PM EDT
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The big Linn-Frink with 16 foot wings, as Gushee brought to Syracuse for the ATHS convention, is also identical to one in the Cole Transportation Museum in Bangor, Maine. These were sold through Ford & Smiley of Skowhegan, Linn/Frink dealers at the time.
On Sargent, I would say they were putting WOOD plows, (originally Union Ironworks Co.? And after 1929 ATECO?) as they had been building for horse drawn street and sidewalk use for years, on tractors c. 1927. I can say Frink's second plow, c. 1922, was a metal plow on a Linn Tractor for Frank Carpenter's Black River Bus Lines out of Watertown, NY (Carpenter later had a cool Walter Truck/Bus plow hybrid). Root is another early plow innovator, as was Good Roads, who were putting plows on motor graders and Cletrac crawlers by the mid 1920's in Upstate NY (John R. Tinklepaugh of Germantown, NY, agent). Could be it was the first tractor plow in Maine? No one really went after anyone for false advertising, or mincing words, in those days, you have to take it with a grain of salt. |
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