Machinery
Machinery Gantry cranes rising over an empty shipyard dry dock

Two gantry cranes going up over a dry dock in Dalian span 840 feet between their legs and hoist a load 328 feet into the air, which is a span no shipyard crane anywhere has matched

SEP 10 · 5 MIN
Machinery A 50,000-ton forging press ram descending onto a glowing aluminum billet in a Cleveland forge shop

One press in Cleveland shuts on a glowing block of aluminum with 50 thousand tons behind it and squeezes out a fighter bulkhead in a single stroke, and 7 stories of the machine sit below the shop floor

SEP 10 · 4 MIN
Machinery 6,000-ton Art Deco terminal riding rubber tire dollies across Newark runway, 5 000 ton

A 5,000 ton Art Deco terminal in New Jersey was cut into three pieces and rolled three quarters of a mile across a working airfield, and the dollies had to hold every lift point in step from the first foot to the last

SEP 10 · 5 MIN
Machinery The cutter head of a boring machine caked in river silt

Water presses on the bottom of a 54 foot cutting face at 109 pounds per square inch and on the top at 24 less, and the slurry holding the Yangtze estuary up has to track that gradient continuously

SEP 9 · 5 MIN
Machinery Stone pouring into the fall pipe of a rock installation ship

A 461 foot rock installation ship built in Philadelphia carries 22,000 tons of stone in its hold, while an inclined pipe under the hull puts that stone on the seabed one load at a time

SEP 9 · 5 MIN
Machinery 432 walking robots lifting historic brick building foundation in Shanghai construction alley, century old shanghai

Each of the 432 walking robots under a century old Shanghai block carried only about 10 tons, while the thing that could have cracked the brickwork was never the weight but the mismatch between them

SEP 9 · 5 MIN
Machinery Shore cranes lashed to the deck of a heavy lift ship

Two shore cranes 302 feet tall were lashed to the deck of a 554 foot carrier bound from Germany to Thailand, but a Bay of Biscay storm put nearly all of both into the sea off Galicia

SEP 8 · 5 MIN
Machinery An excavator on its side in a collapsed parking garage basement

A 67 ton excavator dropped 15 feet through a parking garage deck on the second day of a Pennsylvania demolition, but the machine was out in a week and the site stood still for a month

SEP 8 · 5 MIN
Machinery Drone carrying pilot line during power line stringing across a deep gorge, 650 foot gorge

A drone flew a pilot rope half a mile across a gorge near Yass and dropped 650 feet on the way, while the conductor that followed it weighed more than the aircraft could have lifted at all

SEP 8 · 5 MIN
Machinery A boring machine head lifted from a street shaft

A boring machine stopped 23 feet short of its exit shaft under a Toronto street after running into 14 steel anchors nobody had drawn on the plan, and freeing it took 19 months

SEP 7 · 5 MIN
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