Ultimate Earth Mover

Jimbo · 2005-06-17T23:40:13-05:00 (Friday)

got a link to this thread from a bandmate (and recently graduated mechanical engineer)

http://talk.buybelowcost.com/eve/ubb.x/a/tpc/f/994105582/m/491104728/r/5931013421

Bryan · 2005-06-19T10:06:12-05:00 (Sunday)

holy mother of god. That's unbelievable

raptor · 2005-06-20T12:04:10-05:00 (Monday)

The only thing bigger than that is Bryan's Ego.
LOL

Jerry · 2005-06-20T12:27:10-05:00 (Monday)

I think someone is really good with Photo Shop and has way too much time on their hands.

William Grim · 2005-06-20T13:40:39-05:00 (Monday)

QuoteJerry wrote:

I think someone is really good with Photo Shop and has way too much time on their hands.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Assuming they were real, how the hell would they get them over hills and rivers?

I read a post saying they had to divert entire rivers for these too move.... yeah, like that would take less than the supposed 5 years it takes to build one of these.

Plus, when I looked at the "photos", there was definitely an odd lighting difference that hit me. It's gotta be fake.

Ross Mead · 2005-06-20T16:30:28-05:00 (Monday)

QuoteIt's gotta be fake.

What do you mean fake? I've got one of those babies sittin' in my garage right now...

:-P

Bryan · 2005-06-20T18:56:33-05:00 (Monday)

Quoteraptor wrote:
The only thing bigger than that is Bryan's Ego.
LOL

Watch it Scotty boy

Bryan · 2005-06-20T21:20:09-05:00 (Monday)

I took some (very brief) time to see if I could find anything about the company/product on the net. Didn't find anything very solid other than this news bulletin. You people are all smart, do some research one way or the other before saying "it's fake" I'm still looking so right now it's inconclusive.

http://www.mhca.mb.ca/HeavyNews/february24-05-bulletin.pdf

edit 1:
I'm bored here's some more images after doing a bit more research, the pages are in German..
http://images.google.de/images?hl=de&lr=&q=tagebau&btnG=Suche

edit 2:
Here's some more on them under their real name, Bucket Wheel Excavators. I've yet to find the "bam" evidence but I'll get ot it eventually
http://cms2web.fam.de/english/Products/Opencast%2520mining%2520systems/Bucket%2520wheel%2520excavators/

edit 3:
I finally found the page of the manufacturer for that product, it's not simply "Krupp" but ThyssenKrupp you can go here for more information. I've yet to find a page that shows that exact one we were looking at, but I think it's safe to say that there are items just like it out there.
http://www.krupprobins.com/mining/mining.htm#Bucket%20Wheel%20Excavator

edit 4:
I finally found it. If you look at this pdf on the companies website on page 4 you will see a picture of the machine in question
http://www.thyssenkrupp-foerdertechnik.com/F/HOME/Images/05_1_1001_e7.pdf

Is it just me or has the nature of the internet evolved from "believe everything you read/see because only those that really know what they are doing put information on it" to "be careful what you believe" and further on to "don't believe anything until you verify it" and finally we're at "don't believe anything..ever...in fact don't bother verifying it it has to be fake..but dont' bother checking"

kind of disgusting

Jerry · 2005-06-20T22:05:29-05:00 (Monday)

Well, the company pdf doesn't prove that it isn't some kind of company concept drawing.

What might be more telling is the person that the photo is attributed to, Peters Jochen, is some kind of animator:

http://www.peters.jochen.de/

No smoking gun, but there is plenty of photo shop art pieces on his website.

BTW, I was just making a conjecture for conversation. I really didn't care that much about the subject to put any effort in to "researching" it.

Brad Nunnally · 2005-06-20T22:27:57-05:00 (Monday)

My mom works at a foundry, she said she has seen things like this at mines that used to be around here when our coal mines were a big business. She said she has never seen anything as large as that, but stationary pieces of equipment that resembles it. Never underestimate the power of a bored person, if someone got bored enough I could see them making something like this. Still a movie or official specs would dispell all the "fake" talk.

Bryan · 2005-06-20T22:36:52-05:00 (Monday)

It doesn't take interest in a topic to research it...sheer boredom was more than enough for me!

Brad Nunnally · 2005-06-20T23:01:23-05:00 (Monday)

QuoteModernDayDarwin wrote:
It doesn't take interest in a topic to research it...sheer boredom was more than enough for me!

Beware the Bored White Kid !!! (see my AIM Profile.)

William Grim · 2005-06-21T08:40:56-05:00 (Tuesday)

QuoteModernDayDarwin wrote:

Is it just me or has the nature of the internet evolved from "believe everything you read/see because only those that really know what they are doing put information on it" to "be careful what you believe" and further on to "don't believe anything until you verify it" and finally we're at "don't believe anything..ever...in fact don't bother verifying it it has to be fake..but dont' bother checking"

kind of disgusting

I did enough research to not find "Krupp" right away. All I found were forum posts about the thing and someone mentioning that rivers had to be moved. It doesn't make sense that rivers would have to be moved and that would somehow take less time than building these on-the-spot. That was plenty of "research" for me.

Jerry · 2005-06-21T09:34:07-05:00 (Tuesday)

QuoteModernDayDarwin wrote:
...sheer boredom was more than enough for me!

Hey, anyone who is bored and would like to program one of our new robots or play with the Department's new poster printer come and see me.

bill corcoran · 2005-06-21T09:43:53-05:00 (Tuesday)

The thing is an earth mover! That's what it does! Looks like it could "move some earth" into the river, which would essentially act as a dam, leaving a nice big channel around it for the river to flow.

I hope version 2.0 will be able to fly, and have laser beams.

Bryan · 2005-06-21T12:43:34-05:00 (Tuesday)

Quotegrimw wrote:

I did enough research to not find "Krupp" right away. All I found were forum posts about the thing and someone mentioning that rivers had to be moved. It doesn't make sense that rivers would have to be moved and that would somehow take less time than building these on-the-spot. That was plenty of "research" for me.

My point was more that the entire internet has gotten this way, only worse than you see here. Stuff posted on the internet is met with one of two responses. Either it's A) older than time and space you and you are dumbass for posting it or B) it's really amazing and therefore COMPLETELY FAKE!

I've sat through many psychology classes and have been pondering getting my PhD in it so I can study the internet as a culture.

William Grim · 2005-06-21T14:39:22-05:00 (Tuesday)

QuoteModernDayDarwin wrote:

Either it's A) older than time and space you and you are dumbass for posting it

Nothing new here. People have long called other people stupid for not knowing common sense ideas.

QuoteModernDayDarwin wrote:

or B) it's really amazing and therefore COMPLETELY FAKE!

Again nothing new here. People have long known the saying, "If it's too good to be true, it PROBABLY is."

Having said that, there is reason to believe these are fake. It's not to say they are not fake; they could in fact be real and in use all over Germany. However, the pictures did look odd, and it was difficult to find good info quickly on the Internet. Plus, I'm not sure who would want to be responsible for the costs of ecological damage.

raptor · 2005-06-23T11:26:29-05:00 (Thursday)

I recently did a little research of my own. My father works with a mining engineer. They moved an earth mover from Indiana to Kentucky. It wasn't AS big as the one picutred but pretty close. The drove it just like this claim and they DID cross rivers, there are picutres of it. What they do is put a strip of land down in the river twice the length of the earth mover and the mover literaly moves the dirt as it goes. So at no point is the river completely diverted, but they do semi-dam it and drive over it.

-Scott

Bryan · 2006-04-11T08:40:22-05:00 (Tuesday)

This thread was made almost a year ago. This morning I checked my email at work and had this email:

Hi, my name is and I came across your posts re the laughable idea that the Baggertransport Rheinbraun AG (the actuall name of the vehicle) was a conspiracy, looking around further I found some information you may find interesting. I thought it was impressive that you had gone to some trouble to research the monster. All the best.

Cheers,

World's Largest Vehicle:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/facilities/crawler.html

Krupp's Badger:
http://www.wisoveg.de/rheinbraun/bagger290504/29052004bagger3.html

Bryan · 2006-04-11T11:56:43-05:00 (Tuesday)

For anyone that's curious, the person that emailed me was a student at the Unviersity of Melbourne in Austrailia. Kind of goes to show how things on a local college message board can have far reaching effects.

Geoff Schreiber · 2006-04-12T19:27:56-05:00 (Wednesday)

Again, after the fact - but Bucyrus is a large dragline manufacturer, I think maybe they are the mfg's of the current largest dragline in the world right now. The only thing I question on this machine is the tread to move it. I watched Peabody Coal move a dragline along the interstate as a child, and it was a fraction of the size of this mammoth. They had to place railties under the treads the whole way to keep from completely crushing all beneath it, and again, it was tiny compared to this thing.

The new Bucyrus lines are "walking" draglines - they have two "feet" that are attached to an offset cam, as the cam rotates, the belly of the dragline is set on the ground, and the feet move forward just a couple feet, the cam then puts the weight back onto the feet and lifts the belly off the ground, and forward a bit as well. VERY neat engineering stuff :)

Mining is a neat industry to get into right now - they're working on programming all the large machines to be line/cable followers, without making them so exact that the road washes out where the machines are dead-on the same tracks every time. Basically, they're following a cable as randomly as possible to avoid having to fix the haul roads as often.

Bryan · 2008-08-19T11:35:46-05:00 (Tuesday)

This thread never seems to die. I was browsing Digg and saw an article entitled "7 images you will never believe were NOT photoshopped."

#1 on the list? Our very own earth mover that spawned so much discussion in this thread...

http://www.cracked.com/article_16556_15-images-you-wont-believe-arent-photoshopped.html

Tony · 2008-08-20T23:36:46-05:00 (Wednesday)

They had a special on the History channel about a year ago about these. They are real. They use them a lot for mining. They can also put a bucket type front end on it. They usually blow up a large area and use the bucket style to fill up those huge dump trucks you might have seen before. What is nuts is that they fill these dump trucks with one scoop. The trucks look miniature compared. Pretty cool.