Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/24/excavator-extricated.html
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Pretty brave guy in the stuck excavator as the big shovel-claws do their thing around him.
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This seems to be content more suitable for digg
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It’s so strange to watch this in Tucson, where you need one of these machines to dig the hole for your mailbox post.
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He was not in there for about the first 15 minutes, then got in. Yes, I watched the whole 40 minutes of it, haha.
My favorite part was when they hold hands, errrr, buckets to get out.
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Well if that’s not a pro. Very impressive. Trump got us in the muck, hopefully JB is as efficient as this dude.
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These machines have a very smooth action. Do they have some sort of microprocessor that says “swing the bucket back to where it was last” (which would be a bloody handy feature) because it seems to be doing more work than the operator is putting in. I imagine old school machines required a lot more lever pulling but this beast is probably more productive.
Any operators out there?
Oh, and this reminded me of an article (maybe on BB) from a few years back. Real estate in London is never getting cheaper so the only way to go is up. That requires deeper foundations and apparently it is quite common in the first building demolition to find excavators that were used in the earlier construction to be set in cement as it was cheaper to just leave them there than to extricate them.
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The original book is better.
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It’s a little bit trickier than that. Going up is also subject to restrictions (although these can be more or less theoretical depending on money and political will). And many people bought their nice Georgian or Regency listed building and don’t want to or cant get permisssion to demolish it but of course, the house that was sufficient for Lord Grantham and his household for the London season is no longer sufficient for the mega rich and their staff.
So the obvious solution to find room for your cinema, your gym, your swimming pool, your parking is to go down. Sub-basement below sub-basement. Which of course requires great big, deep holes in the ground.
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The “pond situation” is sure to be a perennial topic of conversation at Home Owners Association meetings for years to come. Fisticuffs may break out.
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Couldn’t they just keep digging until they have a basement, then turn the excavator into a boiler?
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Yeah that felt like the climax.
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There are also suposed to be rules for how far down you can go. Though the tunnel boring machines for the latest London Underground line went through some Russian or Arab oligarchs basement that hadn’t had quite the full planning approval for the depth it went to.
It is interesting to watch Grand Designs to see the problems that are had with much more modest and permited levels of basement construction, especially with regards to water tables.
That wouldn’t surprise me. After all the main attraction of going down is that after a certain depth nosy neighbours can’t see how deep you’re going.
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Not a word I’d have expected to use re a digger excavating a stuck digger, but boy was that guy deft
And how the hell does someone get in that deep to start with? That’s a video I’d like to see, too.
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Nah - it’ll be mud wrestling.
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Are there any simulator video games for excavators and other equipment like this? This looks at least as much fun as driving a race car.
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Yes, he was a pro. I was watching his hands - he is “one with the machine.” I’ve driven large excavators like this and smaller backhoes and tractors. They are all similar.
For the first hour or so, it’s herky jerky while you figure out which direction is which, and any special controls like for the grabber. But after that hour, things start to smooth out. After a few years of driving them, you learn how to accelerate and decelerate the motion at the right times, kind of like how you get to know the brakes on your car. You know when to press hard or soft on the pedals, depending on the situation and what you want to do. Same for an excavator - you get used to the machine, and controlling it becomes an unconscious process: an extension of your hands which are an extension of your mind. I find driving large machinery to be completely relaxing.
And then you get into issues of how to move an object that is beyond the capabilities of the machine to directly lift it. You can do all sorts of things: push or pull on one corner, put a rock under it and push the thing onto the rock so you have a fulcrum, use a chain, lift one edge of it while trying to scoot the entire excavator backwards. Fun fun.
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I’ve never seen such a feature, but I’m an amateur. I think it would be of limited use, other than trenching, and experienced drivers have muscle memory that makes something like that superfluous. The operator is putting in exactly as much work as what you see the machine doing. He’s just very smooth and skilled. When you would ask about someone who was going to come work on a job, the highest recommendation was ‘he drives that thing like a Tonka toy.’
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