And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Wednesday, January 25, 2023
Walking excavator - Soviet Union. Like a machine from some weird dystopian future. I like the ratty curtains in the operator's cab.
There are older American mining machines that do the same thing - mostly they were dragliners. Cheaper than installing tracks for machines that don't move around that much. The modern oil & gas drilling rigs do it better though - it takes a couple of weeks to assemble the rig after transport, but some of them now have feet on each corner. Once assembled, the feet pick the entire drilling package up, derrick and all, and shift it in the desired direction. With modern directional drilling, all of the wells can be in a tidy row at the surface to facilitate a single drilling location, while all of the well targets might be miles away in different directions, below. Drill a well, walk the rig a few feet, drill the next one.
Standing 22 stories tall and weighing 13,500 metric tons, Big Muskie was the world's largest dragline and the biggest machine that has ever walked on the face of the earth. With the boom down, it was almost 500 ft in length. Big Muskie was a coal mining Bucyrus-Erie dragline owned by the Central Ohio Coal Company. It removed more than twice the amount of earth moved during the construction of the Panama Canal. Its bucket could hold two Greyhound buses side by side.
There are older American mining machines that do the same thing - mostly they were dragliners. Cheaper than installing tracks for machines that don't move around that much. The modern oil & gas drilling rigs do it better though - it takes a couple of weeks to assemble the rig after transport, but some of them now have feet on each corner. Once assembled, the feet pick the entire drilling package up, derrick and all, and shift it in the desired direction. With modern directional drilling, all of the wells can be in a tidy row at the surface to facilitate a single drilling location, while all of the well targets might be miles away in different directions, below. Drill a well, walk the rig a few feet, drill the next one.
ReplyDeleteI guess paint was not in the budget.
ReplyDelete"They travel in single file to hide their numbers."
ReplyDeletetiny robed figures with glowing eyes...
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcmGKsHZXZ8
ReplyDeleteThe USA built bigger ones that walked:
ReplyDeleteStanding 22 stories tall and weighing 13,500 metric tons, Big Muskie was the world's largest dragline and the biggest machine that has ever walked on the face of the earth. With the boom down, it was almost 500 ft in length. Big Muskie was a coal mining Bucyrus-Erie dragline owned by the Central Ohio Coal Company. It removed more than twice the amount of earth moved during the construction of the Panama Canal. Its bucket could hold two Greyhound buses side by side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcmGKsHZXZ8
220 cu yd bucket.
Delete"walked" is the key word here. The biggest/heaviest machines are bucket wheel excavators used in Europe. Walk on tracks.
ReplyDeleteLooks a bit on the gimpy side.
DeleteHere is one of Helmerich & Payne's Flex 3 drilling rigs, going for a walk.
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/BmZDfn0LB4c
Howl's Moving Excavator!
ReplyDelete