This is one of my favorites. Fist time I saw one like it was on a billboard in Colorado. It cracked me up......



M

Poor little guy

I have been working on this 87 Grand Wagoneer for the last year to make it our camping / boat tow vehicle. Its a Alabama vehicle so not any rust to speak of but the last 10-15 years has been rough for the vehicle with previous owners not wanting to put any time or money into maintenance or time to fix anything and the last 5 or so just sitting. I like to fix and save things so its been a year of constant work, time and money. Its technically Darlenes vehicle and first Jeep so I get to contribute the time and sweat-equity. Its mechanically reliable now and everything pretty much in working order. One of the last major things I had to do was get the radiator rebuilt and when I pulled the radiator I noticed this “still hanging on” once resident. I guess once you find a good vehicle a mouse would rather die in it than give it up.

Probably a woman who's husband has 8 0r 10 boats don't let lesa see that sign I will have the same one at the end of my driveway lol
Charlie

This sign is right near my house for the safe harbor on the calm side of the pier.

It drives me nuts.... Obviously the person who developed it was not a boater....

Very cool. Thanks for the description. I love machines that break stuff. A few years ago we had this to cut back all the Russian Olives and other trash brush in the field across the road.







The operator was a virtuoso. Amazing how he could move and take down just what he wanted to without damaging an adjacent tree. This wasn't a particularly big variant of the machine, but he could put the business end of it at the top of a pretty good sized tree and just buzz it away to nothing in a matter of seconds.

I think the last one we built had 300 tons or so of hydraulic force between two 12” cylinders. It didn’t take that much pressure especially with the nick we put in the base to create a stress riser, the rail would start to yield at about 150 tons, the extra force made it move a little quicker so it broke faster. It was surprising how much faster the rail broke in cold weather.
Before we built the hydraulic breakers we broke rail by laying it on its side and used a torch about 4’ long to cut the base all the way across and as far up the web as you could through the base, after it cooled we would hit the ball of the rail with a sledge hammer and it would pop in two. This worked much better in cold weather too. You can imagine, everybody was happy when we built the first hydraulic breaker!
The breaker made a pretty loud ringing pop when the rail broke and it would throw shrapnel just a short distance, a two foot piece would average about 90 pounds, we sometimes even broke 18" pieces, the smaller pieces melted quicker is the reason the mills paid more.

Locomotion wrote: The breakers we built were stationary and fed by a conveyor system, we built a notch blade into the jaws, it nicked the base of the rail and you only had to bend the rail about 15 degrees or so before it broke, we built a surge circuit into the hydraulics so that it reversed when the rail broke to speed up the operation, no slow long travel of the jaws after the rail broke. The short pieces like that went to the steel mills to be remelted.
We also sold long scrap rail to be re-rolled, these mills sliced the rail into three pieces, the base, the web and the head of the rail was then heated and run through rollers to make stuff like fence post, shelf mounting rail, bed frames, etc, with out melting it completely down, much more energy efficient.

How many tons of pushing force were you getting?

And hydraulic cylinder size?

Roughly what did one of the 'ingots' weigh?

Did it throw shrapnel?

I bet it made quite a sound.

The breakers we built were stationary and fed by a conveyor system, we built a notch blade into the jaws, it nicked the base of the rail and you only had to bend the rail about 15 degrees or so before it broke, we built a surge circuit into the hydraulics so that it reversed when the rail broke to speed up the operation, no slow long travel of the jaws after the rail broke. The short pieces like that went to the steel mills to be remelted.
We also sold long scrap rail to be re-rolled, these mills sliced the rail into three pieces, the base, the web and the head of the rail was then heated and run through rollers to make stuff like fence post, shelf mounting rail, bed frames, etc, with out melting it completely down, much more energy efficient.

My grandad worked for N&W from the age of 13 until his death at age 63 in 1966. My wife and I had the privilege of taking a train from Venice Italy to Innsbruck Austria for our 30th anniversary. Wow. love trains!