#D8 DOZER NIGHT DRIVERS#
#D8 DOZER NIGHT DRIVER#

He was probably right, but the cop gave him a telling-off and told him to take the thing home and never get caught driving under-age again. Nor was he too fazed at being caught red-handed driving a large piece of machinery while unlicensed, telling the cop he wasn’t on a public road and the cop had no jurisdiction.

The biggest social change Dave Lott has noted over the past few decades has been the emergence of health and safety as a major issue, something that has little troubled a man who’s worked on dozers without an accident for three quarters of a century. This is based on a plant inventory of four John Deere and one 36t Komatsu dozers, supported by seven excavators up to 25t, and four Volvo dump-trucks.īilly showed his propensity for machinery at a young age.ĭave tells the story with gleeful pride of the day Billy got stopped by a cop driving his dad’s Fiat Allis 11B bulldozer down into the Waiau Riverbed for a bit of practice.īilly was just five-and-a-half years old at the time, and Dave recalls with mirth the sight of the young fella driving the machine standing up because that was the only way he could reach the pedals. Keeping him company in the cab throughout the day is his Jack Russell bitch Tui, the latest in a succession of such dogs to have shared his life and work.ĭave’s son Billy Lott is imbued with the same life-long love of earthmoving machinery as his father, and today runs the family business. He’s been on the job since 7am and he won’t be turning the machine off until his own standard quitting time of 6pm or later, then it’ll be back to the house on the Waiau River, in the town of that name, where he lives alone next to the Lott Contracting yard. Scroll forward to 2021, and Dave Lott is still at the controls of a bulldozer, this one a John Deere 750J with hydro-static transmission and power-shifter, and he’s ripping out the concrete platform that, until its abandonment decades ago, used to serve as the railway station for the village of Rotherham in North Canterbury.

#D8 DOZER NIGHT DRIVERS#

Indeed, within a week he had been assigned to instruct other drivers on the Caterpillar’s gate-change intricacies, and his own lasting bond with D8s was established. However, this didn’t deter him from assuring his new Ministry of Works bosses that he was more than up to the task, and from the moment he first turned the key he handled the giant machine like a veteran. He’d never driven a bulldozer before showing up at Roxburgh looking for a job on the $48 million scheme to harness the power of the Clutha River to meet a critical South Island power shortage.

That was in late 1940s when he was a kid in his teens. Hugh de Lacy catches up with him.ĭave Lott fell in love with bulldozers from the first day he lied about his earthmoving experience to get behind the controls of a Caterpillar D8 on the Roxbugh hydro-electric scheme.

#D8 DOZER NIGHT DRIVER#

If bulldozer driver Dave Lott isn’t the oldest in the world, he’d be the only nonagenarian still working an 11-hour day on the machines.

D8 dozer night