What a day!!!!!!

[wroughtn_harv]

Yesterday wasn't an ordinary day for me.

When I called my daughter a couple of weeks ago and told her what I was going to be doing on her birthday she exclaimed, "that's great. Glenda gets to take you shopping."

"I get a new tractor?" I asked.

"No" she said. "But you don't get on to a Gulfstream IV wearing your red t shirt, Rustler jeans, and them funky boots you seem to wear seven twenty four."

 

[wroughtn_harv]

Maybe I'd better explain.

I like to say my one talent is having friends much smarter than myself. One of those friends that's much smarter than me is responsible for millions of dollars worth of purchasing heavy equipment. JCB wanted to give him the red carpet tour they give their big customers. He invited me along because he knows I'm a big JCB fan.

So yesterday morning I wore a better looking pair of boots, Levis instead of Rustlers, and a button up shirt instead of my comfortable and rather red t shirt. I picked up bud at his house and we met the JCB crew and other selected clients at the Denton Texas regional airport.

Two hours later we were in Savannah Georgia at the JCB factory. They make Loadalls, backhoes, and skid steers there on a thousand acres.

There I met who has to be the luckiest man on the planet. His name is Donnie. He's sixty five years old. And he's even better at finding friends who are much smarter than himself than I am. Forty years ago he was operating an excavator in Great Britain when a man walked up and offered him a job. That man was Joseph Cyril Bamford (JCB).

Donnie has an office. It is well equipped. He's there to demonstrate the equipment in his office.

 

[shvl73]

Looks like a great time! Did they let you play with the toys?

 

[wroughtn_harv]

One of the things Donnie does so well is show how balanced the JBC backhoe is. He does this by digging a trench. Then he backs the backhoe into the trench and continues to operate the backhoe.

This amazed me. I've had a backhoe in his position. What I recall most vividly about that moment was how hard it is to breathe when the heart is blocking the throat as it tries to leave the body. Donnie didn't miss a beat.

 

[wroughtn_harv]

Looks like a great time! Did they let you play with the toys?

Yup.

I still have a grin on my face you can't take off with a jackhammer.

 

[wroughtn_harv]

After Donnie was done with stunning us with his display of those things that separate the boys from the men he brought the tractor back front and center to show off.

 

[jinman]

"No" she said. "But you don't get on to a Gulfstream IV wearing your red t shirt, Rustler jeans, and them funky boots you seem to wear seven twenty four."

Well, Harvey, you didn't get on a Gulfstream IV, but that's a darn nice Gulfstream G200 you were on. That's the old Israeli Aircraft Industries (IAI) Galaxy. Gulfstream bought the company from IAI. They are still manufactured in Israel and then come to a completion center here in the USA. There's a center at Alliance Airport and we were just over there a couple of weeks ago taking pictures of a G200 for one of our newest training programs at CAE SimuFlite. Nonetheless, that was a really nice birthday treat to fly to Savannah and see the JCB "acrobatics" show. Thanks for the pictures. Those are some very nice machines. You don't see as many of them as Cat, Deere, and Case, but they sure are impressive.

Oh...and happy birthday!

OOPS! I just reread and you said it was your daughter's birthday. So redirect my birthday wish to her please.

 

[wroughtn_harv]

If you didn't know already, I like to make things. So of course my interest was about how the tractors are made. JCB brings in sheets of steel. Those sheets of steel are cut, formed, welded, and powdercoated into the pieces that become tractors.

The next time you are around a skid steer look at the loader arms. Compare that to the one JCB uses in their skid steers. It's a lot like the one they use in their LoadAlls, imagine that.

A lot of their welding is done by human weldors even though they have quite a few robotic ones. Basically from what I saw the material comes in sheets of steel. The only thing I didn't see assembled was the motors, transmissions, tires, wheels, plastics. Everything else seemed to be made in house.

 

[wroughtn_harv]

I thought the automated powdercoating line at Quality Powdercoating here in Dallas was something. You ought to see the one they have at JCB! A piece goes onto the line raw steel. When it comes out the other end it's been through a bunch of chemical baths, heated up, powder coated, and then cooled back down enough to be handled.

 

[wroughtn_harv]

It's surprising to see a massive yellow frame become an airconditioned deluxe cabbed backhoe. But it happens here.