By the seaside
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hair bear
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Re: By the seaside
Interested to see how it works. With the tide high enough to get a boat alongside the weed line suggests the digger would be surrounded by water.
The future's bright.. Bright red and grey that is.
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essexpete
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Re: By the seaside
hair bear wrote:Interested to see how it works. With the tide high enough to get a boat alongside the weed line suggests the digger would be surrounded by water.
Yes, that is why the concrete is raised. The old equipment gets a real punishing in the salt environment. That is a relatively new hire machine.
The cockling is now quite high tech theses days. The boats carry and pull a suction dredge with the bed blasted ahead of a dredge with a blade. Behind the blade is a kind of riddle basket that allow silt and small shells to fall through. The remaining cockle laden material is sucked up onto the boat to go through a rotating washing riddle before the cockles are shot into 1 tonne bottom chute containers in the hold. The containers are slung out by the excavator onto a flat trailer. The cooking plant is fed by a telehandler lifting the containers over a reception hopper with the cockles elevated to yet another rotating washing riddle with a stop start fashion to batch feed into a twin chamber steam pressure cooker. One side is cooking while the other is loading. All the process is monitored/controlled by computer with compressed air operating rams and gates.
50 years ago the cockles were hand raked into baskets with the boats aground on the beds at low tide. Baskets carried by blokes with yokes up a plank and tipped into the hold. Unloading was a reverse with cooking in a simple boiler. This progressed to the suction dredge but still unloaded with baskets in the late 70s. The next stage was unloading with a clam shell (NPI) on old excavators. That took place for many years, unloading into large loader buckets or trailers to tip into reception hoppers. I think the move away from that has reduced waste with a very valuable catch.