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It is not uncommon to find excavators on city streets but this is the most common type of equipment. Among them, there are real giants, who seem like aliens. Let’s find out which excavator in the world is recognized as the largest and which is the biggest dragline in the world.
The largest walking excavators
Among the huge excavators, the biggest is Big Muskie crane. It was designed in 1969 year. At that time, it cost twenty-five million dollars, which was a huge sum. The giant’s building took almost two years.
To supply the mechanisms and electric motors with energy, a cable with a voltage of more than thirteen thousand volts was used. Big Muskie is comparable with a small town of thirty thousand houses on its energy consumption. The trenching bucket of the excavator is so large that it would easily accommodate two buses. You need a crew of five people to manage this vehicle.
Russian production
In Russia, Uralmash and NKMZ are engaged in the production of excavators of walking type. Uralmash produced the largest in the USSR walking excavator ES 100/100. Its annual productivity is equal to seventeen million cubic meters of soil. The bucket’s volume is one hundred cubic meters.
The largest mining excavators
Of the career excavators, the largest one is Bagger 293. This name can be seen in the Guinness Book of Records. It is listed there as the world’s largest mechanism. The weight of this excavator is more than fourteen thousand tons with a length of two hundred and twenty-seven meters.
This monster was created specifically for digging quarries. It needs less than a day to dig a pit wide as a football field and with a depth of ten meters. Bagger 293 can work without stops for days. To work on it, one team replaces another. Each team consists of five people.
The largest hydraulic excavator
Of the hydraulic excavators, the largest is the RH 400. It was designed and then assembled by the German company ‘O & K’. At a weight of a thousand tons, it has a power of 3.3 megawatts. Its bucket can withstand about a hundred tons and accommodate fifty cubic meters of soil. The excavator itself weighs nine hundred and eighty tons. Despite the cost of fourteen million dollars, the RH 400 has recouped pretty quickly.
This machine can work even under extreme conditions. It has a system for heating engine oil, thanks to which it is always ready for work.
The largest excavator in the world
Krupp built the Bagger 288 excavator, which is by far the largest in the world. The buckets of this excavator are mounted on a rotating wheel, which ensures uninterrupted digging.
The construction of the giant was completed in 1978. The customer of this rotary excavator was Rheinbraun. This mining company needed an excavator capable of extracting from the depths, which are inaccessible to other machinery. There is a variant of mining with bulldozers, but with their capabilities, they will work for months. The excavator Bagger 288 can do the same job in just two days.