So your looking at this funky machine and this site aspires to natural history and your wondering what the hell is so natural about this! Well that is the point and time will reveal the nature of this history. This weird vehicle represents just a tiny bit of the heavy artillery employed in the War..an ecological war of wars yet to unfold. Dave Milne, my co-conspirator and often partner in ideas, and I hauled this sucker down from Taylor United's Bellingham ops via the Keystone-PT ferry and then, after fooling around with it for a few years, we hauled to WSU Pullman so it could enter a 3rd life as a test bed for other aquaculture uses. We got some interesting looks on the freeway.
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Here is a sno-cat that had good tractive power. Sno cats are designed to push, grade, rototill snow and ice as they groom ski hills. Of course, it can't float so god help you if you get into trouble on the flats with the tide coming in! I'll rework this post in the future to explore these subjects. This sno cat towed this big roller I had built (thanks Dale Jacobson! for the roller part) and tested.
This roller [Sayce I] was made from an old sheet press, which was nothing more than a 1/2 inch shell mill roller about 10 feet long and weighing a ton+ It was big and heavy but in the end it had too much flotation. That is an example when size mattered and in this case, it was to large as it could not generate the proper amount of down force, even though it could "knockdown" the plant, it was not adequately crushing the root structure. Live and learn.
This is the Heckes-Sayce I roller. I got this on permanent loan from John Heckes and then Dave and proceeded to destroy it towing it across the mud flats testing it up in Oysterville. What made it work well was that it was narrow and had big angle iron flanges that penetrated into the mud. The tow rig was weak and the water tank that formed the core structure was weaker. When filled with water it was heavy, narrow and had all the right stuff to get to the Spartina root structure and it worked well till it hit a few stumps, piling, and just plain leaked and fell apart. I should have filled it with concrete.
I finally concluded that you had the ability to tow/pull and implement (an open question), then then a "Yap Wheel Gang Roller" might be the set up. At some point I was going to hunt up an old Sheep Foot roller (typically towed by a big cat, say a D-6 +) and try that out in the next stage of evolution as that type of roller was bascially two narrow water filled rollers with compressive "feet" (hence the name a "Sheep's Foot" roller). One point is that the root structure may have needed to be cut more than crushed, thus a penetrating disc might work just as well. Dave and I never got that far into our tests to experiment with cutting vs. crushing the roots.
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