Month: December 2014

Here I’ll switch up just a little bit and talk about stuff other than guns.  Here’s an interesting article about some REALLY heavy equipment: World’s Biggest Dump Truck Goes Electric. It’s about a new vehicle (known in the mining industry as a “Haul Truck”) with a payload of 500 metric tons. That’s 1,102,000lbs. Say it Dr. Evil style, “Over one millllllion pounds!”

But I take exception to this bit from the “World’s Biggest Dump Truck” story:

A massive vehicle that can haul loads weighing more than 500 metric tons—the equivalent of 350 VW Golfs—just hit the work site in Siberia, claiming the title of the world’s largest dump truck.

But it has another claim that makes it even more impressive: an electric drive motor. Electric-powered vehicles have been around to do heavy lifting in mines for years, but those trucks, known as trolley trucks, received their electricity from overhead power lines.

The Belarusian truck manufacturer BelAZ wanted the efficiency of the trolley trucks, but in a free-moving behemoth suitable for open pit mining.

Ah, no. Yes, in some mines overhead lines are used, but in every mine I do work at (all open-pit), the trucks are exclusively internally driven and they’re just called “haul trucks.” The biggest trucks I work around are the 360 short-ton (720,000lb) capacity Caterpillar 797, and 400 short-ton (800,000lb) capacity Liebherr T282, the first is a mechanical-drive truck with a huge diesel engine running the wheels through a 7-speed automatic transmission, but the second is a 3,700Hp diesel-electric. Big electric motors in haul trucks are not new. Not hardly.

But you don’t get how BIG these things are until you’re near one:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKpTVbQPX_E?rel=0]
Awhile back I got a headhunter call looking for someone willing to be a Liebherr field service technician for their haul trucks.  I’m a bit old for that and told them so.  Maybe twenty years ago, but they didn’t have the technology twenty years ago….