Heavy equipment is FUN!

[BobSch]

http://averagjoe.com/earth.pps.ppt

[gad5264]

52 pictures and I bet 52 pairs of dirty pants to go along with them.

[LCHIEN]

I was here

I left and a week later it looked like this:


Shell Mars $1B platform, offshore Louisiana, Gulf of Mexico, before and after Katrina in 2005.
I had two pieces of equipment on this rig. One I designed in 1978 and it was still working, I was surprised to see it, but fell overboard in the storm along with the giant derrick.
The other I designed in 2004 and was miraculously left standing - it was to the right of the rig and the rig fell to the left.

It was built to withstand 140 MPH winds and 60 foot seas, Katrina exceeded both by a considerable margin.

The cost to repair this platform was close to $300 million, lost production per day was like 190,000 barrels of oil or around $1.2 million per day @$60 per barrel for over a year.
That make this probably equal or more costly than the sum of all the pictures in the OP.

[jonmulzer]

How you turn an excavator or dozer over on its side is beyond me. The truck, dragline, shovel and other issues are fairly common. They shouldn't be, but they are. But the dozer and excavator photos are bewildering. It is nearly impossible to turn either of those over. Unbelievable.

[bruce hylton]

How you turn an excavator or dozer over on its side is beyond me. The truck, dragline, shovel and other issues are fairly common. They shouldn't be, but they are. But the dozer and excavator photos are bewildering. It is nearly impossible to turn either of those over. Unbelievable.

You have never been on anything but flat ground? Anything else and you can roll either.

[docrowan]

I work for a heavy equipment dealership. Almost all of the machines pictured are designed to make holes in the ground or level high spots. As such, they are usually working around slopes, sometimes very steep slopes. A dozer easily walks up a slope that a man would have to crawl on his hands and knees to climb.

Rollovers and fires are a regular occurance. We have 10 shops and I'd guess each one has at least one and usually two or three a year to deal with. Many of the machines in the OP are quite repairable. Despite all the consumer safety laws, machines are built much tougher than any on-road vehicles. Fires, on the other hand, can easily total a machine out.

[billwmeyer]

Dozer

When I lived in Laharpe, Ks, a company was installing a new city wide sewer line. They had to do a lot of blasting through rock to install the line. One place near the highway, they decided to limit debris, they would park the dozer over the blast area to shield the highway. The picture in the paper of the dozer on it's side was very funny.

Bill

[jonmulzer]

You have never been on anything but flat ground? Anything else and you can roll either.

No. I have been in the trades for 12 years and spent 5 years before that helping my father running machinery. I have had dozers sideways on slopes that you could not walk across. I have run excavators on slopes almost that steep. They will slide at a lot lower angle than they tip at. You have to do something REALLY stupid to tip a track machine. The engine, transmission, frame, final drives, basically all the heavy stuff, sits between the tracks. I graded some slopes in Cincinnati, Ohio that were so steep we had to overfill the crankcase and transmission so they did not lose pressure and I never felt like it would tip. We have run loaded articulated trucks across 2:1 slopes without an issue. I have slid D8R's (almost 90,000 lbs) down frozen 1.5:1 slopes for over 300 feet and never tipped one over. (A little tip, if you turn a dozer sideways on frozen dirt the grousers that give you so much traction on dirt become skis on tundra, hehe) Not only have I never rolled a track machine over, I have never even seen it done and I used to do a lot of environmental earthwork where there were hundreds of acres of slope work on every job. In four years of doing that I helped to move probably 20 million cubic yards, probably 8,000 acres of slope work greater than 2:1 and we had an average of 10 dozers on any site. Not a single one ever had to be tipped back up.

I am not saying it can't be done, but you almost have to try. I probably have 20,000 hours on them myself and have supervised hundreds of thousands of man-hours on machinery and I have yet to see it.