Here is a shovel that I've been compiling information on for about 15yrs now. The Marion model 5561. This model was the first to use the; "Knee Action Crowd" eliminating the stress on the boom as stripping shovels evolved to larger CY capacity. There were a total of 17 of this model built in the 1940's-50's The capacity of the bucket ranges from 35cy to 45cy. Hanna Coal Co. now Consol Energy owned 4 of these machines: The Tiger, The Green Hornet, The Groundhog,& The Wasp. These were the predecessors to the giant super strippers that followed in the late 50's to the mid 60's Hanna Coal owned; The Mountaineer,Gem Of Egypt,And the last operating super stripper in the world,The Silver Spade. All of these type of machines are all gone now. The Spade was cut up about 3yrs ago.
I've been contemplating trying to figure out how to build a working scale model of this early giant. I have several photos a parts book and operators manual that I've been studying and still not sure what scale to built to. According to my calculations if I went with 1/16th like my 9W Dragline, the overall height to the boom point will be approximately 90'' tall. Looking over the drawings the biggest hurdle looks to be the 8 crawler units it rides on. I count 64 gears alone in the driveline from the center pin. I may resort to having some castings made on the crawler units since it may take hundreds of hours to just machine the 304 crawler links. This build may never materialize but I'm going to pursue my design work till I'm sure I can pull this one off.

The machine I'll be focusing towards is the one with the solid boom. This was their first; the "A" shovel named ; "The Tiger"




Made some progress this weekend. I tried scanning a large format drawing from my parts book in two parts on my 8.5x11 scanner but it was hard to join the two scans so I bought a larger scanner and was able to scan the crawler unit whole and with the help of Carl5858 on the RC Truck and Construction forum, convert it to a drawing file to be able to edit the lines and scale it to my appropriate size. 8 of these will have to be machined. In 1/16th scale they will be 14-1/4'' long.
This is the scan before any modification:


Top View:


Picture from a 1:1 machine. Notice the corn stalks behind the machine.

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9W Walking Dragline Build Links:
http://www.rctruckandconstruction.com/showthread.php?t=117
Scale 4x4 RC Build
http://www.youtube.com/user/Scentlessapprentice9?feature=mhee#p/u/9/59FR27c9BwE
http://imageshack.us/user/caffco

Amazing what builders do with drawings.

Glad to hear your moving in that direction. If I ever make it back home for more than a day or so I will stop by and say hi.

Well thanks for all the positive feed back. I'm at a stand still on the 9W till I can get some more measurements when the weather gets better soon. I want to start on the outer skin so it'll look more like a real machine. So, between working on things that make me money, I've been working on the drawings for the 8 crawler units this past week. Looks like I have the track links pretty well figured out and the main crawler frame partially done less where the shaft centers go. Once I figure out the gear pitches and tooth count for the drives the drawing will come together.

Chris: 1/50th scale too small for me, I'm having trouble seeing close up in my late 40's.

SDBOB: I'm scanned my parts book and downloaded a free vector converting program to convert the drawing to a file that Auto Cad can open where I'm tracing some of the lines and scaling to full size.

FiatAllis41: I hope you didn't get burned too badly from the coffee.

Stop down anytime Todd. I'm usually here till 8pm most of the time.

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9W Walking Dragline Build Links:
http://www.rctruckandconstruction.com/showthread.php?t=117
Scale 4x4 RC Build
http://www.youtube.com/user/Scentlessapprentice9?feature=mhee#p/u/9/59FR27c9BwE
http://imageshack.us/user/caffco