largest bucket wheel excavator

The Bagger 288  is the largest bucket wheel excavator in the world today with the ability to remove 240,000 square metres of material every 24 hours. (10,000 square metres an hour). Each of its 18 buckets can hold 6.6 cubic meters of material, and these buckets can easily dig up five football

pitches to 50 feet deep in a day.

The main chassis section is 46 meters wide (or about 140 feet ) and rests on three rows of caterpillar tracks that has four sets of tracks in each set. Each track plate is 3.8 meters wide.  The turning radius of this machine is 100 meters.

It is also the worlds biggest vehicle because it can drive along on caterpillar tracks under its own power, as the photo two paragraphs down will testify.

Below the pictures shows the excavator moving towards another mine. A special roadway had to be constructed so that it could travel across motorways, countryside and even golf courses ! It would be impossible for it to drive down a road, even an eight or ten lane motorway would not be wide enough.

This cross-country trip cost 7.7 million Euro"s. It was in fact a great saving by moving the vehicle this way rather than dis-assembling it and then re-building it at the other end.

Giant bucket wheel excavators are the largest mining vehicles on earth. The technical giants from Krupp are custom designed and built for the specific operating conditions and the production rates for each open pit mine that they work in. Digging heights of as much as 100 metres, which is carried out effortlessly on its huge out-stretched booms.

The excavator weighs in at 13,500 tonnes, and moves at just over ½ Kph. Two huge electric motors give a combined power output of 22,500bhp and this makes it the worlds biggest excavator to move under its own power a true feat of human engineering.

The power of this machine must never be underestimated as the pictures below testify when the excavator accidentally and quite easily picked up a big heavy bulldozer and tossed it onto its boom.

The excavator wasn"t damaged but I suspect that the bulldozer was an insurance write off.