All machines Giant Machines
Giant Machines
Tunnel borers, draglines, bucket wheels and cranes that move the world.
Want the mechanism, not just the footage?
We wrote a full explainer for this category: Walking Draglines. What the machine does, how it works, the numbers that matter and who buys one.
16 films
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26:04 Giant MachinesHow a walking dragline works
Twenty-six minutes inside one of the largest machines on earth, walking the house, the motors, the drum room and the operator's chair. Earthmovers Media explains why a dragline uses drag and hoist ropes instead of hydraulics, and what happens when a rope lets go. The best long-form dragline explainer available.
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45:06 Giant MachinesThe bucket wheel excavator, the largest machine that moves on land
A full-length documentary on the bucket wheel excavator, the largest land vehicle humanity has ever built. The Bagger 293 weighs about 14,200 tons, stands 96 meters tall and can move 240,000 cubic meters of earth in a day. Forty-five minutes of engineering that reads like science fiction but has been running in German lignite mines for decades.
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14:41 Giant MachinesMonster mining machines: draglines up close
A dragline is a crane the size of an office block that throws a bucket, drags it through the earth and swings a hundred tons of overburden in one pass. BuildWitt films from inside the house and up on the boom, so you finally get a sense of the physical scale. The machine walks on shoes rather than tracks because nothing else could carry it.
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12:48 Giant MachinesAmerica's iron giants, the most powerful metalworkers ever built
The United States Air Force built a set of forging presses in the 1950s so large that seventy years later they are still doing work no other machines can do. One squeezes with 50,000 tons of force. Machine Thinking tells the story with archive footage and real engineering, and the scale never stops being absurd.
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9:19 Giant MachinesA shaft sinking machine digging straight down
Herrenknecht built a machine that sinks a vertical shaft from the surface downward, underwater, with nobody down the hole. The cutting head hangs below the shaft lining and grinds its way down while the lining follows it. It solves a problem that used to kill people regularly, and it is beautifully explained.
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8:51 Giant MachinesHow a hard rock tunnel boring machine cuts stone
Hard rock TBMs chew through solid stone using disc cutters that crush rather than cut, gripping the tunnel walls to shove themselves forward. Herrenknecht shows the cutterhead, the grippers and the back-up gantries as one continuous underground factory. Machines in this family run in diameters up to roughly 19 meters.
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8:46 Giant MachinesA tunnel borer building its own concrete lining behind it
Inside an earth pressure balance shield as it builds its own tunnel behind itself. Concrete segments are lifted by an erector arm and locked into a ring while the machine pushes off that ring to advance. The tunnel is finished the moment the machine has passed, which is the entire genius of the design.
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8:40 Giant MachinesRiding a 14.5 million pound dragline
A ride along on a working dragline that weighs 14.5 million pounds, filmed by someone who actually runs it rather than by a film crew. You hear the drums, feel the swing and watch the bucket come back full. The unpolished first-person view is exactly what makes it worth watching.
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5:45 Giant MachinesWhy the world's largest land vehicle exists
A crisp, funny explanation of why anyone would build a 14,000 ton machine that moves at one tenth of a mile per hour. The answer is that continuous excavation beats truck and shovel when the material is soft and the volume is enormous. Good context to pair with the raw footage clips.
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3:32 Giant MachinesA mobile harbor crane unloading bulk cargo
A mobile harbor crane running a grab, swinging bulk cargo out of a ship's hold at a pace that makes the pile disappear. The crane drives itself along the quay on rubber tires, so one machine covers berths that would otherwise need three fixed cranes. Liebherr films it from the water, which helps the scale land.
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3:09 Giant MachinesA floating crane rated to 3,600 tons
A floating crane that lifts up to 3,600 tons in a single pick, used to set bridge spans and offshore platform modules that cannot be built in place. The vessel ballasts down, takes the load and ballasts up to lift. Three minutes of physics doing something that looks like a special effect.
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2:29 Giant MachinesA tunnel borer's cutterhead hauled back for a second dig
A tunnel boring machine cutterhead the width of a house is hauled back overland to start a second bore. HS2 filmed the whole move. Seeing the business end of a TBM out in daylight, on a road, is the only time most people ever get a proper look at one.
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2:08 Giant MachinesAutomated ship to shore container cranes
A ship-to-shore gantry crane picks a container off a vessel and puts it on a truck with the operator sitting in an office rather than a cab 40 meters up. Anti-sway control and automated positioning do the hard part. Cranes in the largest class reach over 70 meters out across the water and lift up to about 120 tonnes.
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2:07 Giant MachinesThe world's largest bucket wheel excavator
Two minutes of National Geographic doing what it does best: putting a human next to the Bagger 293 so your brain can register that the bucket wheel alone is 21 meters across. Eighteen buckets, roughly fifteen tons of earth each, turning continuously. Short enough to share and impossible to argue with.
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1:07 Giant MachinesRobots welding a double hull ship section
A gantry-mounted welding robot lays continuous seams inside a double-hull ship section, working in a space no welder would want to spend a shift in. Kranendonk built the system around the geometry of the block rather than the other way round. Short, technical and quietly impressive.
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1:01 Giant MachinesA shipyard Goliath crane going up, in time lapse
A time lapse of the Goliath gantry crane at the Meyer Turku shipyard lowering a complete ship block into place. The crane spans the entire dry dock. Sixty seconds, no narration, and the sense of scale arrives immediately.