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Found an old dredge manual that said a 10-inch cutter could move 500 cubic yards an hour
I was cleaning out a storage shed at our yard in Mobile and found a 1972 operations guide. Has anyone else seen numbers that high for a machine that size, or was that just hopeful thinking back then?
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faithwalker1d ago
Reminds me of old car manuals promising insane gas mileage. They'd print those numbers under perfect lab conditions with a feather-footed driver. My grandpa's lawnmower manual from the 80s said it could cut an acre in an hour, but you'd have to run it flat out over a putting green. I bet that dredge number is the same, a best-case scenario with ideal material and zero downtime. They just don't build the real world into those specs.
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paulschmidt19h ago
My buddy worked on a dredge up in Michigan that had a manual claiming 400 yards an hour. They spent a whole season trying to hit that number in perfect sand. The closest they ever got was maybe 280, and that was with a brand new cutter head and no big rocks. Those old specs were for a perfect world that just doesn't exist, like you said. The manual never mentioned the time lost to clearing roots or fixing a worn pump.
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