Machinery
Machinery Bucket wheel excavator spinning at Hambach open-pit mine in Germany, built across 4

Built across 4 years for a single German pit, the heaviest land machine ever assembled still digs lignite while its dismantling sequence has never been made public

SEP 28 · 5 MIN
Machinery Ring crane base section being lowered into place at Westdorpe assembly yard

Three smaller cranes built a ring crane at a Dutch yard, and the finished machine lifts 6,000 metric tons and places a 3,000 ton load 720 feet up

SEP 25 · 5 MIN
Machinery Cape Hatteras lighthouse sliding along steel track beams during its 1999 inland move

Cape Hatteras lighthouse rode 2,900 feet inland on rails greased with bar soap, and restoration crews later found 116 cracks in the 16 iron brackets hidden under masonry at its top

SEP 23 · 5 MIN
Machinery Kiruna Church riding on SPMT axle lines along a widened Arctic road, 672 metric ton

A 672 metric ton wooden church in Kiruna rolled three miles on two transporter trains held within 3 inches of level, and its bell tower followed six days later

SEP 21 · 5 MIN
Machinery Preserved walking dragline Oddball boom and bucket at Swillington near Leeds

With a 1,200 ton body and only nine minutes of power left, Britain’s last large walking dragline walked backward 160 feet into permanent preservation

SEP 20 · 6 MIN
Machinery Rusted Ohio dragline bucket at Miner's Memorial Park in Morgan County meadow, lifted 325 tons

A walking dragline in southeastern Ohio picked up 325 tons of earth in a single bite for 22 years and moved twice what the Panama Canal took out, and the only part of it left standing is the bucket

SEP 15 · 4 MIN
Machinery NASA crawler transporter carrying Artemis moon rocket along the Kennedy Space Center crawlerway

Burning 165 gallons per mile across Florida flatland, the crawler transporter has hauled three entirely different rocket programs across six decades and no replacement has ever been ordered

SEP 13 · 5 MIN
Machinery A massive boring machine cutterhead ring being lowered into a launch pit in New Jersey, boring machines

Two boring machines arrived from a German factory in about 96 pieces each and were bolted together in a pit in New Jersey, but the first mile they cut runs through a rock ridge rather than under the river

SEP 11 · 4 MIN
Machinery sewer drone survey descending into manhole beneath a footbridge in northeast England, caged drone 33

A caged drone dropped 33 feet down a manhole in northeast England and mapped 197 feet of sewer in half a day, while the crew that would normally do it on ropes never went in at all

SEP 11 · 4 MIN
Machinery Industrial chocolate conche drum open with dark paste inside, chocolate conche machinery

Dry powder can spend 3 days turning inside a chocolate conche before it leaves as a warm liquid, while the flavor it comes out with was made by the machine rather than carried in by the beans

SEP 11 · 5 MIN
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