A Bucket-Wheel Excavator on Earth

[Denny]

[Innocent Bystander]

Repetition!

[Nanohedron]

That is an appallingly grim and horrid contrivance. Who invented it, again? Sauron?

[dwest]

Minnesota is home to several of the worlds biggest and ugliest excavators. Makes restoration an interesting challenge with all the toxic substrate they deposit on the surface, now those places look like Mordor.

[chas]

If I had one of those, I'd be the envy of every father of a four-year-old boy.

Whad'ya say it does the quarter mile in? 500 seconds? I take it 0-60 is, like, NOT?

[Nanohedron]

Minnesota is home to several of the worlds biggest and ugliest excavators. Makes restoration an interesting challenge with all the toxic substrate they deposit on the surface, now those places look like Mordor.

"Those places" would no doubt be the Minnesota Iron Range. Or "Derange", as we Minnesotans call it when speaking our native dialect. We like to think the word is rather apt.

[MTGuru]

Who needs aliens landing with their giant machines to destroy the earth, when we seem to be doing that just fine on our own, thank you.

[weedie]

To put environmental issues and visual pollution aside for a bit......its a pretty impressive machine....some great engineering there.
I see a perverse beauty in this big digger ...

[MTGuru]

It does look almost unreal, doesn't it ...

[Doug_Tipple]

I wonder what the road looks like after that steel monster has rolled over it. On my street the city put in new sidewalks and concrete driveway ramps about three years ago. It didn't take long for heavy equipment (concrete trucks, etc.) to turn the beauty concrete work into rubble in several places near my house. Then they simply drive away and leave you with the mess that no one is going to repair.

[s1m0n]

Is it just me, or is that machine begging to be spliced into the first reel of Star Wars, on that desert planet where those small brown enslaved-robot dealing monks roll up in their upside-down ark? Err, it's decades since I've seen it, so my description may well be totally incoherent.

[dwest]

I'm betting it's German, it has a certain "Metropolis" look to it.

[s1m0n]

I wonder what the road looks like after that steel monster has rolled over it.

It looks like they've laid about half a yard of sand over the section of road that the machine will be crossing.

[MikeS]

I'm betting it's German, it has a certain "Metropolis" look to it.

You are correct, sir. Here's some additional information from Wikipedia:

The Bagger 288 (Excavator 288), built by the German company Krupp for the energy and mining firm Rheinbraun, is a bucket-wheel excavator or mobile strip mining machine. When its construction was completed in 1978, Bagger 288 superseded NASA's Crawler-Transporter, used to carry the Space Shuttle and Apollo Saturn V launch vehicle, as the largest tracked vehicle in the world at 13,500 tons. However, the Bagger is powered from an external source and is more correctly described as a mining machine which can be moved, while the crawler-transporter was built as a self-powered, load-carrying vehicle.

The Bagger 288 was built for the job of removing overburden prior to coal mining in Tagebau Hambach (stripmine Hambach), Germany. It can excavate 240,000 tons of coal or 240,000 cubic metres of overburden daily – the equivalent of a football field(soccer) dug to 30 m (98 ft) deep. The coal produced in one day fills 2400 coal wagons. The excavator is up to 220 m (721 ft) long and approximately 96 m (315 ft) high. The Bagger's operation requires 16.56 megawatts of externally supplied electricity.[1] It can travel 2 to 10 m (6.6 to 33 ft) per minute (0.1 to 0.6 km/h). The chassis of the main section is 46 m (151 ft) wide and sits on 3 rows of 4 caterpillar track assemblies, each 3.8 m (12 ft) wide. The large surface area of the tracks means the ground pressure of the Bagger 288 is very small (17.1 N/cm2 or 24.8 psi); this allows the excavator to travel over gravel, earth and even grass without leaving a significant track. It has a minimum turning radius of approximately 100 meters, and can climb a maximum gradient of 1:18. The excavating head itself is 21.6 m in diameter and has 18 buckets each holding 6.6 cubic meters (7.9 yd³) of overburden.

By February 2001, the excavator had completely exposed the coal source at the Tagebau Hambach mine and was no longer needed there. In three weeks it made a 22 kilometer (14 mile) trip to the Garzweiler mine, traveling across Autobahn 61, the river Erft, a railroad line, and several roads. The move cost nearly 150 million German marks and required a team of seventy workers. Rivers were crossed by placing large steel pipes for the water to flow through and providing a smooth surface over the pipes with rocks and gravel. Special grass was seeded to smooth its passage over valuable terrain. Moving Bagger 288 in one piece was more economical than disassembling the excavator and moving it piece by piece.

[hans]

So the pic is not from Minnesota, but Germany, taken on bagger 288's 22km journey from Hambach to Garzweiler mine in 2001! More pics:
http://blog.daum.net/y017370/8499643