News Report
The Top Bucket Award 2009
Courtesy of Earth Mover Magazine
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Graham Black reports from the annual 'Top Bucket' event, a competition between the instructors responsible for training plant operators within The Royal Engineers. This year’s 'Top Bucket' event – traditionally a chance for the Army's plant instructors to have some competitive fun with machinery – was strange, as the competitors were civilians. Training Sappers in the art of operating plant and machinery has recently been privatised, and for the better it seems. The new arrangements principally affect the military's plant training school at Wainscott in There will also be four instructors permanently with the group (a student/instructor ratio of 3:1) with the ability to immediately call upon additional staff if a student requires intensive one-to-one tuition. With lots of stick time and the students under constant supervision and guidance, this is probably the best plant training operation in the But it needs to be good, as they aim to train highly skilled individuals. The official Army trade is Plant Operator Mechanic (POM); he or she is not only expected to be able to operate a wide variety of machinery, but also to carry out maintenance and repair work. More importantly, they need to be able to diagnose major faults and call for the correct replacement part and then fit it in the field. As we were waiting for the event to start, I happened to notice a CPCS trade test was underway nearby; a student in a dozer being watched by an external examiner. The student was performing a fairly hefty basement dig and the way that the soil was being moved across cut was a joy to see. This was a young solider, performing to a higher standard than many of finalists at the civilian Caterpillar Operator Challenge, but without the benefit of a full laser guidance system. The students learn to operate a wide range of modern machinery including JCB 4CX backhoe loaders, Case 721 wheel loaders and Caterpillar 320 tracked excavators. There are also Volvo graders and Terex articulated trucks on the syllabus, in addition to light and medium compaction equipment and mini excavators. While the excavators and the like are close to civilian specifications, the light wheeled tractor (based on the JCB 4CX) and the medium wheeled tractor (based on the Case 721) are much chunkier versions of their civilian counterparts, after all such machines and their operators will face front-line duties. Due to the configuration of the machinery, the environment of some of the more extreme job sites and the aggressive nature of some of the tasks, the resulting machine operating style of the training centre can not be described as smooth-as-silk. But this is no demonstration team practicing for a performance at the SED show, nor an owner-operator mollycoddling his investment, but a well-oiled factory producing combat engineers. |
I guess that I should be politically correct and call them military engineers, who are often called upon to undertake challenging humanitarian projects in far-flung parts of the globe. However, as a traditionalist, it was heartening to learn than military exercises are a key part of the syllabus and that the top brass of the training centre have recent combat experience. Enough said, let's get back to the competition for the prestigious award of 'Top Bucket 2009'. This is not a working environment for a thin-skinned or shy individual. As I walked over to the first test, the previous competitor was being aggressively mocked by his colleagues, as he had performed one half of the timed test with the brakes on. His rather colourful reply suggested that finesse was not the name of the game and all that mattered was getting the job done, but admitted that he had had now learnt where the handbrake is on the Terex. Moral amongst this group of instructors was obviously high. The next competitor rocketed down the course with the big backhoe, then performed a rather nifty combination move to open the 4-in-1 bucket and gently grasp the upright tyre, so it remained at a right angle to the ground and not squashed at an acute angle between the bucket's jaws. Tearing back down the track, he then performed a tight turn around a bollard by braking and pivoting, at one point with a wheel off the ground. Due to his clever pick-up, balancing the tyre in an upright position at the end of the short course was done quickly, and was performed while the front end of the machine dipped under heavy braking. The time for the test was phenomenally quick; there were no points on offer for finesse. However, the next test was all about finesse; a tennis ball suspended from the bucket of a wheeled excavator, which had to be dipped into the open tops of a succession of traffic cones. The operators even had to account for the wind as they undertook this precision task. Likewise, it was all about finesse and precision when fishing more tennis balls out from a sandpit and loading them into over-sized egg-cups with a mini excavator. Trying to score gaols with a football and the bucket of a midi tracked excavator was a bit of fun and tested hand-eye coordination. The tempo of the competition heated-up as a tracked skid steer loader was thrown around an obstacle course, a machine that received almost universal acclaim from those that operated it. Next up was another big backhoe, this time moving large wooden blocks. Unfamiliar controls and control patterns caused many to falter at the pick-up with the 4-in-1 bucket, but the real test was using the machine's all wheel steer function to navigate backwards around a tight course. |
Although there was a marginal element of 'drive it like you stole it' operating styles inflicted on Terex's demonstration machines in what was a fun, but highly-competitive afternoon, underneath all the bravado there was a real desire to further improve the collective operating technique. Congratulations to Roy Adams who won the event. He was presented with the Top Bucket trophy by Pat Bowring, this years Chairman of the CMPE. The Contractors Mechanical Plant Engineers (CMPE) association is made up of individual members, not companies, with a common interest in the operation, ownership, maintenance, repair and improvement of plant and machinery. The objectives of the association are to broaden the scope of knowledge of such plant and its application, by placing the corporate knowledge of members at the disposal of any section of the industry. The CMPE has been a major sponsor of the Top Bucket event for many years in order to encourage stronger links between the military and industry. Of course, the instructor-competitors are used to being in the limelight – it's in their nature – but the real stars of the show were the judges. I must be getting old, because – like Policemen – they looked awfully young to me. Their suntans were the first clue that these were not juniors and some had clearly been around the block. These are, in fact, the next intake for Phase 2 of the UK Army's plant operator training course, today in the unusual position of judging their civilian staff instructors. To get to this stage they will have undergone basic military training and then passed the Plant Operator Mechanics course. This will have been followed by at least two years on attachment to the business end of the Army, including a spell in . They are either Lance Corporals or Sappers with attitude. The next phase of plant training equips these advanced students with a grounding in a wide range of civil engineering applications. For example, the Royal Engineers have, in past conflicts, operated their own aggregates extraction and production operation. Drilling, blasting and loading is part of the syllabus, together with a recent major upgrade in crushing and screening technology, as the operators will now learn their trade on modern tracked machinery. Soil remediation techniques are being studied in detail, including hiring-in state-of-the-art machinery to complement the more traditional tractor-based techniques. Basically, they are exposed to all the machine operating activities necessary to build a road from scratch. Fresh graduates of the British Army's plant school are not necessarily the world's best excavator operators, or the most proficient crusher supervisors. What they are equipped to do is to operate and maintain anything in the muck-shifting fleet; mastering the basics of any bit of kit almost immediately, then quickly getting into their stride to provide support to whatever task is given to them. |