All machines Machines Walking Draglines
Giant Machines
Walking Draglines
26:04 How a walking dragline works. Filmed and published by Earthmovers Media. Plays from YouTube, nothing here is re-hosted.
What it does
A dragline removes the overburden sitting on top of a coal or mineral seam. It throws a bucket out on a rope, drags it back through the ground to fill it, hoists it, swings, and dumps the spoil in a pile behind itself. One pass moves an amount of earth that would take a fleet of trucks a shift.
How it works
There are only two working ropes. The hoist rope lifts the bucket, the drag rope pulls it toward the machine. Everything else is rigging that keeps the bucket at the right attitude while it fills. There are no hydraulic cylinders in the digging system at all, which is precisely why the machine can be built this large: rope and drum scale in a way that cylinders do not. The house sits on a huge circular tub that carries the weight while digging. To move, hydraulic or eccentric "walking shoes" on either side lift part of the load, shift the machine a few meters and set it down again, which is why a dragline travels at a fraction of a mile per hour and never leaves the pit it was assembled in.
The numbers
Big Muskie, a Bucyrus-Erie 4250-W built in 1969, remains the reference point: a 220 cubic yard bucket, 13,500 short tons of machine, a 310 foot boom and 222 feet of height. Working draglines in service today are commonly in the 100 to 160 cubic yard class and weigh in the millions of pounds. They are assembled on site over months and typically work the same pit for decades.
Who uses one
Surface coal mines above all, plus large phosphate, oil sands and heavy mineral sands operations.
More giant machines
See the whole category-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
Looking for one of these?
APE does not trade walking draglines. We do buy and sell the surrounding plant: shop equipment, cranes, generators, compressors, pumps, conveyors and material handling. Start a sourcing request.
American Plant & Equipment has been buying and selling industrial machinery out of Roebuck, South Carolina since 1975, with 97,000 machines in inventory. Tell us the process you need to run and we will go and find the machine, or we will move the one you are finished with.
Prefer to talk? Call (864) 574-0404 or email sales@americanplantandequipment.com.