not for use at home

[angledge]

One of the engineers from our Sacramento office just sent me some photos of the largest earth mover in the world.




Specifications:

• The mover stands 311 feet tall and 705 feet long.
  
• It weighs over 45,500 tons.
  
• Cost $100 million to build.
  
• Took 5 years to design and manufacture ...
  
• ... and another 5 years to assemble. 
  
• 5 people are required to operate the mover.
  
• The bucket wheel assembly is over 70 feet in diameter with 20 buckets, each of which can hold over 530 cubic feet of material. 
  
• It can remove over 76,455 cubic meters each day. (100,000 large dump trucks at 40 yds. each)

The mover was built by the German company, Krupp, and is used in an open-pit coal mine.

Comments

[angledge.livejournal.com]

According to the email I got, the reason the thing is driving over a German highway is because it's easier to drive the thing from the manufacturing facility to its final destination than to assemble it in place. Its top speed is 0.33 mph.

[sskipstress.livejournal.com]

It's almost as if it would just as easy to build the factory on the site, then disassemble the factory when it's built. And I bet that thing could wreck a factory pretty quickly.