Cat D6

 

 

 

Sometimes I meet up with and old mechanic mate of mine, who despite not being at all academic, was the most competent mechanic I’ve had fix machinery. Back in the 1960’s we made progress without following rule and regulations, and he reflected how drivers used to reverse large, loaded trucks, which led me to this. My mate was into Caterpillar machinery.

 

Cat D6 Dozer

We had Cat D6 dozer on the forest, and while Mick was the driver, I’d spent a few long days on the old girl too. Mick and I put in many of the roads on the forest, although my role was doing the survey work and sorting out the culverts, and keeping an eye out for problems along the way. I used to survey and plot onto chats all the work we did on the forest, roads and compartments mainly… compartments being the areas planted in a given year. To do all of that, I used army surplus prismatic compass, abney level and chain, all bound in leather cases… and my trusty survey book.

I didn’t pre-survey the road, batters or cut and fills before we did any dozer work, I was a rule of thumb fellow. If there was a hill we had to descend, which was most often, I used to go to the other side of the gulley and using the abney level side on (usually, you peer through it lining the crosshair with the target, and move the spirit level to level and read off the degrees); side on you line the body of the level where you want the road to go, set the spirit level and read off the degrees. Twelve degrees is the comfortable slope for a logging truck but some pinches ten was ok-ish. Of course, less than twelve degrees was even better… but on short ridges you have to compromise.

 I would then go to the roadline and flag it with survey cloth, which was nothing but white linen that I’d ripped into inch wide strips. Using my Abney level set on the degrees selected, I would flag the line at the top of the cut, or batter, for Mick to follow. But on one particular line, I struck a problem. It was a south-lying face and covered with tall native scrub, so visibility was a bit of a challenge. Half way down, smack in the middle of the roadline was a massive Totara tree, around six feet in diameter. Of course I could have cut it down, and blown the stump to bits; Totara is a stately tree but it was defoliating, so near the end of its life… saying that is relative, because it could hang on for another hundred years. Old Bert my mate, co-debater and sparring partner happened to be with me in case I needed a slasher,  he said, ‘Y’know, this tree saw Captain sail by.’ That was enough for me, the tree was going to stay!

 

It was just a matter of undoing the work I had done, which was a day’s work, and had the choice of a chain or so above the tree, or a chain below it; I chose the former because it made for a better crossing in the creek where we would need a three-foot culvert… and the fill to cover it. The cut was on the right-hand side of the dozer, which is the side of the hydraulic blade lever and it’s natural that Mick wasn’t watching the left-hand side as much, so he tended to make the road a bit narrower. Especially on steep land, but where native scrub is growing, I didn’t like stripping the vegetation off, but I wanted the whole carriageway to be on solid, not fill. If it was on fill, fifty years hence, the scrub rots and the road slumps.

 

About every chain (22 yards) we put in one-foot culvers to stop the water table scouring deeply, I’d just spend a day’s culvert placement with three guys, their shovels and a crowbar after Mick had done his best with the dozer digging out the bed. Another problem surfaced, getting towards the gulley, Mick struck blue rock… most of the rock was either red metamorphosed sandstone, or ‘rotten’ schist. The schist wasn’t rotten at all but is just younger, weak, yellow so fractured easily. The blue rock is still schist but baked a bit more and hard as the hobs of hell! The dozer had a winch, not rippers so we had to blast the rock. I had a Shot-firer’s ticket so that was my job too.

The compressor had an old Vanguard motor, and no battery, so we cranked it to start, and always it started well even after sitting unused for months. It was on a single axel, making it a challenge to back it down the hill with the Commer truck. She had a canopy on the back to transport men, so there was no visibility and the mirrors were small. She had a running board so I did what the old lorry drivers used to do. I stood on the running board (step) with one foot, (door open) and the other on either the brake or the accelerator. One hand on the steering wheel, and the hard part was, there was no power steering! I only had to go forward a couple of times to reset, which wasn’t bad. When my Dad’s Ford truck had a full load of milk crates, that’s how we backed it too.

Mick and I spent a week on the jackhammer drilling the holes about a yard apart and some a couple of yards deep. A dusty job, because the cutting tip was tungsten in the shape of a cross with a hole in the middle, the jackhammer would ump the drill up and down five times and then do a quarter of a turn, after a bit, move the lever to stop the jumping and force compressed air to drive the dust up and out of the hole. We had a magazine for storing the gelignite and cortex detonating fuse, and we kept the detonators, and safety fuse in the storeroom cupboard, but I needed to order another six of cases of gelignite for a rock bluff on the other side of the gulley. I usually put one plug in each hole, joined them all with cortex and attached a detonator to the safety fuse and taped the det to the cortex, which makes it all go bang at once. Instantaneously.

Cortex is a manganese fuse, and I found it best to tape it in the direction of the flow fron the det. Some people tie it, but it’s useful because it makes each stick go off at once. To shorten a concrete culvert pipe, three wraps of it around the pipe, will just disintegrate that piece of that pipe and leaves the reinforcing to be cut with bolt cutters. We even used it to blow the tops out of trees to make a logging spar. The safety fuse has gunpowder in the middle but it didn’t light easily for safety reasons, so you cut the fuse diagonally, placed the matchhead on the gunpowder and strike the matchbox against it. I had a wisdom tooth removed and a detonator fitted in there nicely, so that’s how I crimped the fuse to the det. It isn’t particularly dangerous… the explosive bit is at the very end, and the rest is a tube that the fuse fits into, so the boom bit was outside my mouth and I just chomped on the soft bit and it worked like a charm.

The rock bluff turned out to be quite a mission, because at the start we could only blow a dozer-blade full, because there was nowhere for the dozer to ‘stand’ but after clearing the rest, the last blow was two cases on a flat ‘paddock’ of rock, and up she went. We just had to lower it by about a yard. Those days, we had no safety equipment, helmets, earmuffs (no wonder I’m deaf) goggles or gloves. We needed access, so we just poked the road through with the gear we had.

As a team we used to work hard, but there was a certain joy in doing it, and there’s the difference to today… regulation stifles us.

The Very Best Pig

 

The Very Best Pig That Money Could Buy

My father used to tell us a story about Kaiser Bill’s pig; it seemed to amuse him more than us. He, like his peers, thought Kaiser as the enemy, to him World War One was a fight against the Kaiser.

When Germany was defeated, the Kaiser lost his title and went to live in Holland, perhaps as an asylum seeker. Anyway, a tribunal had been set up in Britian to sort out claims of business dealings that were in place before the war. Bill, or whatever a demoted Kaiser is called, sent a claim to recover the cost of a prized pig… probably a boar for breeding… 

 

Early in the year, before the outbreak of war, Kaiser Bill sent his farm manger to England to buy the very best British pig that money could buy. He wanted to improve the bloodstock of his personal piggeries. The pig in question should have a pedigree that must go back to the dimness of time with the medals to prove it. The Kaiser’s London agents went on the search for a Gloucester Old Spot breed, which was the popular breed at the time, so they travelled to Somerset to buy the very best pig that money could buy. They found a prize pig that the Gloucester Old Spot Society committee said was worth its weight in gold… which of course they would say if the Kaiser was to buy him.

Kaiser Bill was sent news that the pig had been found, and when the money was sent, the pig was off to the port for shipment to Hamburg. But the port officials were unmoved at the sight of the very best pig that money could buy, because there was swine fever in the land, and sending him would go against old King George’s rules and regulations. So back the pig went to Somerset and the very best pig that money could buy was put back in his pen. As time went on the managers of the Kaiser’s piggeries lost hope for their bloodlines to be improved; but one day in July, the restrictions were lifted, so the very best pig that money could buy, was sent to the port and loaded aboard the ship. But the ship was prevented from sailing because of the outbreak of war! And so, the now German pig was interred by the government as a prisoner of war. Of course, there would be no money sent to Germany under the circumstances of war.

The British tied a blue ribbon around the very best pig that money could buy’s neck and set a collection box upon its back, and for three long years, it collected money for the British Red Cross society. Then one, dark night, the crazy Kaiser sent over a Zeppelin, and the Zeppelin rained bombs on London and killed the very best pig that money could buy! Oh dear! The guns of Flanders boomed on for a time and then came the Armistice… and then the Enemy Debts Tribunal in London, where Britons and Germans came to wrangle over the pre-war debts.

Among them were the ex-Kaiser’s agents, wanting the very best pig money could buy, or their money back instead! So began the letters to the Somerset farmers… but they retorted that the Kaiser had not only cooked his own goose, he killed his very own pig as well! The tribunal, however would not have this, so the farmers gathered again to discuss the problem. They simply sent a bill to the Kaiser for the cost of maintaining the very best pig that money could buy for three long years, and the tribunal, in its wisdom, decided that it made matters even. And there was no more argument over the very best pig that money could buy.

 

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Maybe some of this is true, but I doubt much of it is. Monolougues were popular humour back in those days, and obviously my father had learned this one off by heart. It’s a fair bet that it also rhymed. He must have thought it funny, laughing at Kaiser Bill, the enemy, to belittle him. My father recited it often, so often that it stuck in my brain… but I guess some of it, I ‘interpreted.’.

Exam Results

Exam results

 

Sometimes as a way to retain contact, I look up the examination results of the primary schools we worked with in Tanzania, just to keep the memory banks operating. I won’t name the school I’m highlighting; it’s fairly remote, but it’s one where we had good environmental success, so I have a soft spot for it. It wasn’t only environmental success though; what began as building a new teacher’s office, ended up building most of a new school. We first encountered the headteacher working in a partly falling down, mud brick office and it was he who initially provided the impetus for the environmental programme, and encouraged me to source funding for the building project… but as happens, teachers get swapped around at the whim of a district inspector. There can be all sorts of reasons for teachers to be moved around, but none of them are for the benefit of students in the classroom, and he was moved on.

There was a pair of half-sisters; same father different mothers from a polygamy marriage, which isn’t unheard of in Maasai culture; they were students at the school, and as soon as they were home, they changed into Maasai attire. I hardly recognised them. They wanted me to talk to their father to convince him the value of allowing them to study at secondary school. At the time less than ten percent of students were able to go on to secondary school, but happily that has improved somewhat. I told them that his answer would be for me to fund them, or more likely, for me to marry one or both of them! I told them my culture wouldn’t allow it. I can’t say that they were particularly disappointed.

Their father was a traditional man, who we had supplied with quite a few trees and ‘because the girls had been trained in tree watering, it was their job to ensure the survival of his trees’. I’m happy to say that they were successful. While we were visiting him, several men were butchering a cattle beast; maybe not I the way I would butcher one, but it was clean and hygienic. The meat was to go to the men and the innards were cleaned by the women and eaten by the women. They had a cooking hut which was clean with a clay-dung mixture on the floor that was shiny and clean. Maasai culture emerged in the 15^th century, which of course has adapted over the years, but their ways were set many generations ago.

There are a number of challenges in the school learning environment, not least the culture; this school is not a Maasai school, there were five tribes studying there. The teachers mostly had reached standard IV and had been exposed to ‘pressure-cooker training’, in order to supply the demand for teachers. One hundred and two pupils sat the examinations, and three quarters of them passed the Swahili, Social Studies and Vocational skills; half passed Civic and Moral; under a third passed Mathematics; a quarter passed Science and Technology; and only three passed English. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Swahili is a second language for all of them after their tribal language.

Most kids have chores between school and dark, which comes quickly at seven o’clock… usually there are three tasks, collecting firewood or water and cutting feed for their domestic animals. Very few have lighting, so mostly it is too dark to do extra studies. Most kids were happy with their lot and were disciplined both at home and at school. And they have a sense of humour, as demonstrated by the following: While waiting for a big noise to come to open the new school, to entertain the somewhat bored kids, I told them the story of the Little Red Hen. I chose the bigger Maasai girl to be the red hen, and others to be a cow, a dog, a pig and a frog. And I whispered to them what to say at the appropriate time. The boy who was the pig, snorted as he said the words which had the school laughing but the small fellow who was the frog jumped around saying, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t. Which set the school off again. And as it turned out the school insisted we tell the story again to the big noise, who, as they do, had arrived late.

Having been responsible for the education of four Tanzanian kids, I understand the challenges, the pity being, a lot of intelligence is being wasted or at least not being tapped into. So how did education turn out for those four kids? One is working in the prime minister’s office, one is using her secretarial skills to the full, another is working in dentistry and the other didn’t manage so well, which rates well with the results from the school. But the kids doing well had nothing to do with me, they had to apply themselves, work hard and have a goal… just like the little red hen.