Dadblamed Yankee's are tryin' to convince us that them loggin machines are swamp buggies... Down here in the REAL swamps those contraptions wouldn't make it off the road.

Heck... Even Bubba's pickup truck would go places them contraptions couldn't dream of goin'....

Feast your eyes on a buggy that was built from the ground up to negotiate some of the biggest and baddest swamps in the world...

Florida... Highest elevation is around 200ft and if it weren't for canals and ditches it'd still half be under water...



$bob$ aka Southern Swamp Thang!

I wouldn't take that off road into the tundra, unless you had a real tundra machine handy to pull it back out! Looks like a real good mudder though!! Think flotation, not narrow tires at all!

Yep.. I used to work for a soil testing company and our swamp drilling rigs looked a lot like my photo but the tires were 8 feet tall and 4 feet wide.

We could actually cross a river or lake by putting it in high gear and spinning the tires fast. It was just hard to steer but they floated!

I worked with one for several months while we did the soil testing for the space shuttle runway on Cape Kennedy.

Amazing stuff!

$bob$

During the time I spent in Alaska, I saw lots of rigs head out into the tundra. I only saw one type, high flotation, ever make it back out, and one of them was towed by another of the same type! I think you are refering to the tracked vehicles in your original post, they actually didn't do well on tundra, no flotation.

As with all off road vehicles, the best thing they do is REALLY get you stuck, in some god-awful hole that you didn't want to be in! Fun anyway!!

Yep... Our "buggys" cost a small fortune in labor to build and the Failing 1250 lightweight drill rigs on them were irreplacable and out of production.

We once lost a dozer in quicksand trying to get one out and finally got it with a HUGE dozer we "borrowed" from a neighboring job site.

Once we had to resort to a chopper to get one out and that cost us a small fortune.

The trick was in knowing where you could and couldn't go.

$bob$