Komatsu's Underwater Marvel (Blog Post Re-visited)

I was never quite sure how much of a success these machines were, but as we saw in a report from my Earthmovers colleague Eoghan Daly recently some are still in action in Europe.
 

In the early 1970’s, I had a couple of these Komatsu D155W amphibious dozers in model form, which were made by Shinsei mini power of Japan.

They always reminded me of something you would expect to see coming out of a pod under Thunderbird 2, but in fact, these amazing remote controlled machines were not some kind of fantasy from the creative genius Gerry Anderson's mind, they were actually real, and a number of them saw action on various river de-silting jobs in Japan and in the Philippines.

These machines first appeared in 1972 and were powered by Komatsu’s own engines, although an earlier example, the D125W was powered by a Cummins power unit. The machines had an on land weight of 43,000kg and could work in water up to a depth of 7 metres.

Check out this video featuring a couple of these unique machines undergoing trials.

Looking at the video, I find it hard to believe that the machines could have ever been very effective compared to a conventional backhoe dredging set up, but it is a very clever piece of engineering to say the least.