World's Largest Digging Machine

Monday, May 08, 2006

This is the largest digging machine (or trencher or rotating shovel) in the world. It was built by Krupp and is shown here crossing a road in Germany on the way to its destination, an open air coal mine. Although at the mine the treads are unnecessary, it was cheaper to make the machine self-propelled than to try and move it with conventional hauling equipment. Some factoids:

* The machine is 95 meters high and 215 meters long (almost 2.5 football fields in length)
* Weight is 45,500 tons (that's equivalent to a bumper to bumper line of jeeps 80 miles long)
* It took 5 years to design and manufacture at a cost of $100 million
* Maximum digging speed is 10 meters per minute
* Can move more than 76,000 cubic meters of coal, rock, and earth per day

I'm wondering how this machine is moving from one place to another ...







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3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

If it's like the others I've heard of, it'll have a diesel generator and everything else is Electric powered (including treads). They also do use the treads in the mine as they tend to follow the coal seam (or the seam of whatever they are mining). You'll notice they put down a layer of gravel while they were moving it, that's to prevent damage to any exsisting roads, the sheer weight of it would destroy them. The Discovery Channel has at least one episode on thier Mega Machines Series on these.

6:59 PM  
Blogger Andrew Glazebrook said...

Now that looks just plain dangerous !! You could have someones eye out with that thing !!

9:08 PM  
Blogger necromanc said...

Look like something from a SF movie.

10:09 PM  

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