Sam Descutner has been operating vintage cable shovels since he was 8 years old.
In eighth grade, he began his first restoration project, a 1960 Bucyrus Erie 22-B, which he finished at age 15.
Now at 31, the mechanical engineer in McDonald, Pennsylvania, still maintains his love of vintage construction equipment as a hobby. He especially likes the friction cable cranes, the predecessors to the hydraulic excavator.
“They have a neat feel to them,” he says. “They just sort of flow. I feel like every machine has its own rhythm, and once you're in that rhythm, you're not fighting the machine. You're letting it do its thing.”
As he goes in search of rundown machinery to rescue, he videos his travels and restoration projects. His YouTube channel “Scrappy Industries” has more than 60,000 followers. Some of his videos have over 500,000 views.
His followers also help him on his searches.
“When you have the YouTube audience and you start having more people looking for you, they'll point things your way, which can be awesome,” he says. “You kind of have this army of people out looking too.”
