Woah!

I saw this badboy when I was having a wee look at google regarding Australian exports, for work no less. You can see more of the craziness in its original posting here.

Anyway, I was struck by the sheer size of the bleeding thing. Can you imagine driving along the road and seeing this at the end of the road?! Woah honey! I think there is a giant robot attacking the earth! I mean look at the thing! It looks like some kind of Transformersian (okay I made that up, no worse than any other -ian terms that pseuds use all the time) (it is? oops!) nightmare machine! That ridiculous wheel on the left had side too! This gave me the heebies for about two nights after seeing it.







So what it is you say? Well it is a coal digger believe it or not. This particular beast is used in Victoria, Australia for extracting brown coal- the poor man's black coal. Kind of ironic since it looks like something straight out of Mad Max back when Mel was offensive to everyone and not just females and Jews. I mean, you've seen his outfits in those films right? Eugh. Anyway, back to the beast. Look at it! It's like somebody took the Eiffel Tower, turned it on its side, bent it out of shape a little, added an enormous cutting wheel bucket thing and then attached it to a moving plinth to give kiddies nightmares about. On a more technical note, here is what it is and does:

The Large Bucket Wheel Excavator

* Stands over 95 metres tall
* Is over 215 metres long (2.5 football fields)
* Weighs over 45,500 tons
* Cost US$100 million, took 5 years to design & manufacture and 5 years to assemble on site
* Requires 5 people to operate
* The Bucket Wheel is over 70 feet in diameter with 20 buckets each of which can hold over 15 cubic metres of material.
* It moves on 12 crawlers (each is 3.6 metres wide, 2.4 metres high and 14 metres long) - 8 in front and 4 in back
* It can remove over 76,455 cubic metres of overburden each day

I want one. Who wants to help drive it? First come first served. Bags I get to control the wheel though.