Driving along these tracks it was impossible to discern the amount of damage we were doing to this farmer's crops. From the air it was quite evident. If I recall properly, we made about 100 of these parallel tracks through the maize (corn) fields.
On this survey we were using four Failing Y1100 vibrators (vibs) mounted on International 6×6 trucks as our energy source. In this photo you can see the four vibrators shaking the ground and carving their way through the maize. In the foreground a spare fifth vibrator sits idle, ready to go to work if one of the other four breaks down. In the background are the Schoonspruit/Skoonspruit grain silos.
A major difference between the International vibrators and the IVI buggy vibrators we occasionally used in South Africa was that the IVI machine just had the one motor to drive both the buggy and the hydraulics where the International had two motors, one for driving the truck and the other for driving the hydraulics.
The downdraft from the chopper produced quite a noise record on the line and the crew had to stop recording while we were overhead. The Administrator and I both got fined a case of beer later that evening for disrupting production.
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