Heavy Equipment

[Cumminsman76]

How do you pave 31 degrees banking?

[Hardware02]

Originally Posted by Craneguy

This is me in front of Big Muskie's bucket. It's all that's left...



I get to work with the big stuff all the time, mostly cranes.

This is the biggest one to date. It's a ringer crane that will lift 1,800 tons. The building next to the crane is 150 feet high, and the load was 450 tons. We lifted it 170 feet away from the crane.



The hook alone weighs 25 tons. It wasn't the biggest hook the crane uses. It has 5 miles 2" hoist cable, and came to site on 120 trucks. Assembly took 6 weeks.



This gives some idea of scale...



Not nearly as big as the old school walking draglines, but the fact it all breaks down in to 40ft container sized loads is pretty impressive.

You suck!

How does one get started in a career working on big cranes? I've always been fascinated by them...

Oh...and you suck!

[Hoo Rider]

Those draglines are all electric, so they run off the grid or really big generators. Depending on the size of the dragline, they use as much electricity as a town of 20,000 to 30,000 people.

[Sniper X]

Originally Posted by Hoo Rider

Those draglines are all electric, so they run off the grid or really big generators. Depending on the size of the dragline, they use as much electricity as a town of 20,000 to 30,000 people.

Yep and you should see the supply lines! They are at least a foot in diameter for this one I worked on that day. They never turned it off or even slowed it down except for when I was out on the arm. It was incredibly smooth and I never noticed the movement when on it. When standing near it whilst it was moving, it was awesome, you have no idea how big a man made thing is until you see some of this stuff....or of course air craft carriers.

[ysr612]

my brothers roommate in college worked as an engineer for a company in Wisconsin called Peabody or something close and they made big things like that. They would build them run and test them and then take them all apart for delivery to the site.

[Dan R]

So why was the wire coming off???

[corsair4360]

The one on the mine where we (when I worked for Henry J. Kaiser) built a coal gasification plant weighed something like 3 million pounds, used a 24KV power cord (not all that big in actual size) and would dim lights on the grid, so it could only be started in the middle of the night. The base pad was 60 feet in diameter made of some exotic steel like plows so it did not erode very fast. It had 4 4" diameter haul ropes, each with its own winch, and two 36" diameter shafts to swing the machine on the pad which had very large bearings as well as gear teeth on it. The dragline is all DC, other than ancillary stuff like lights, and the upper layer in the rear of it, is AC to DC generators. That machine I saw was the first, and was completed for use in 1984, when the mine officially opened, although it was in use for 2 years before that.

The boom was 300 feet long, and at full speed swing, it was going 60 miles per hour (aka 66 feet per second). The bucket was 126 yards as I recall. The Freedom mine now has three of those monsters working at the largest lignite coal mine the world according to information I found on it.

The thing has run 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week since the early 1980's. Taking the overburden (not topsoil) off of a 16 foot deep low grade coal seam in North Dakota, north of Beulah. The mine fine coal goes to the Antelope Valley Generating station the coarse chunks to the gasification plant next door, http://www.basinelectric.com/Electri...ion/index.html The gasification plant is the Dakota Gasification Plant http://www.basinelectric.com/Gasification/index.html

If you are inclined go to N 47.36766 W 101.83125 on your favorite mapping program and have a look.

[Rich B]

Have to dig around and find some pictures I have of some of the bucket wheel excavators in Europe I have been up close and personal with....also some monster machines. .

[Keyser Soze]

Originally Posted by Craneguy

Yup. Watts Bar, Tn in '06

Bechtel?

[Craneguy]

Originally Posted by Rich B

Have to dig around and find some pictures I have of some of the bucket wheel excavators in Europe I have been up close and personal with....also some monster machines. .

The 45,000 ton Krupp Bagger 288?


More Pictures here:

http://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/10...ne-in.html?m=1

It's so big it once picked up a 70 odd ton Cat D8 bulldozer in the bucket!

[mark883]

Originally Posted by Hardware02

Big Muskie!

Scrapped.

[andy29847]

This one is a museum...

[Nailhead]

That's jus' a little guy.

Here's his late uncle:

[ig_88e]

Can't say I've seen a dragline, but being in the wind turbine business, I get to see some pretty cool cranes. A year and a half ago I spent a lot of time on a job and my office trailer was next to a Manitowoc 18000 that was parked for the winter. Climbed around on that a bit. Awesome. The weight stack had it's own climate. I think they had somewhere north of 700 tons of counterweight. We spent a while with the weather around 0 F. Then it warmed up closer to freezing. The weight stack frosted up (frozen condensation). It took 3 days for the stack to warm enough to clean the condensation off.

But that's not the biggest one. Was out at the National Wind Test Center and got to see one of the biggest hydraulic cranes in North America. I didn't get great photos, but someone else on the web did (different jobsite). Check it out here: http://forums.dhsdiecast.com/default...posts&t=125557

[Craneguy]

Liebherr LTM11200! Nice machine. Biggest telescopic crane in the world.

Somewhere around $8 to 10 million to buy. 1,500 tons nominal capacity. Not many in the US. They were really designed for wind turbine erection but they came out after the WT boom died out.

Most people prefer crawler cranes for WT work as they can move between the various lifts on site fully erected. Saves a lot of time and money.

The LTM can't do that, and thanks to DOT restrictions, it has to be broken down into quite a few parts for transport.