Rare Motor Grader Rusting in Peace

I have kindly been sent some photos of an old motor grader from an ex-ice hockey colleague of mine, Nigel Harris, who is on holiday on the Greek island of Kefalonia, and has come across this machine on numerous occasions before.

Nigel has documented this machines decay in the Greek sunshine for many years, and since we re-connected through Facebook recently, he has realised that I am a bit of a construction machinery geek!

As such that has raised his interest somewhat, it was never something I spoke about during my ice hockey playing career, as I was more focused on the game, and to be honest, I didn’t think anyone would be particularly interested in my strange fascination for the yellow iron!

Anyway, over the years on the blog, we have featured many old machines at rest in sunnier climes, where they just seem to abandon them wherever they may have broken down and there they stay. Cyprus is a favourite hot spot of mine for finding old relics like this.

Not much is documented about Wakefield motor graders, and they are not mentioned in any of my earthmoving machinery research book collection, so I took to Google and try and find out a bit more.

Apparently, the company was known as Wakefield Construction Machinery Ltd (WCM) and as the name suggests, were based in the Yorkshire town of Wakefield. The company was founded in 1962 manufacturing site dumpers initially, followed by motor graders and some other construction equipment.

In the 1960s the long-established American Ohio based, machinery company, Galion Iron Works acquired a licence agreement with manufacturing rights together with Wakefield to manufacture their own American designed Galion motor graders in England. These machines were mostly fitted with Leyland truck engines or the optional Perkins power pack.

This venture is known to have lasted for about twenty or so years as at the time Galion was searching for a suitable European partner to expand its original machinery to the huge European market during the 1970s and 1980s.

Like other US earthmoving equipment brands like Caterpillar, Clark, Grove and Michigan to name a few, they all followed similar ideas and each manufacturer had its own plans for the then, still unexplored European market.

So, to put it simply, the Wakefield motor grader was essentially based on the more well-known Galion design.

The Digger Man Blog thanks Nigel for sharing these images with us.