There are some jobs that just require something bigger. Whether it is building a bridge to span a gorge, or a spacecraft to span the divide between our home world and our imaginations, sometimes bigger is the only way to go.
Well, we just found this awesome Japanese video of the world’s tallest demolition crane. You are not going to believe how big this thing is until you watch the video.
This video made us think about all the other truly massive machines that humans have created to achieve the most amazing feats of engineering in history. Here is a look at some pretty incredible machines.
The Washington State Department of transportation operates the largest tunnel boring machine on the planet. Designed and built by a Japanese firm, “Bertha”, as she is called, has a diameter of over fifty-seven feet and is three hundred and twenty-six feet long. “Bertha” also weighs sixty-five hundred tons.
Named after Seattle’s first female mayor, it was designed for a specific project, The Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Tunnel. It began work in 2013 and will finish the nine thousand foot tunnel some time in 2018, after several costly delays during the dig.
The tallest construction crane in the world is also the strongest. The Liebherr LTM 11200 can lift more than two and a half million pounds more than six hundred and fifty feet into the air. To put that into some sort of a frame of reference, imagine a crane that can lift twelve adult blue whales about fifty stories into the sky, at once. The self-propelled crane weighs almost a half million pounds by itself.
The Antonev AN-225 “Inspiration” is the largest aircraft ever built. Originally designed to carry the USSR’s version of our space shuttle on a piggyback, this plane can lift more than six hundred and fifty tons. In fact, this plane holds the world’s record for carrying the heaviest payload ever at just over a half million pounds.
While we are talking about space, NASA operates two leviathans to transport heavy vehicles from assembly building to launch pad. Built in the 1960’s for the Apollo lunar program, they are still in service today, having carried every space shuttle to the launch pad.
These vehicles are massive. Known as “crawlers,” the will use a gallon of fuel to travel just forty-five feet, or about one hundred and twenty-five gallons a mile. But to be fair, they have a carrying capacity of five and a half million pounds, and a deck surface area equivalent to three football fields.
And of course, who could forget the massive Saturn V rockets of the NASA Apollo program? Exploding into space with the force of ten Hiroshima atomic bombs, these vehicles carried twelve Americans from our home planet to a foreign world, making our race a truly interplanetary one, if only temporarily.
What is the biggest machine you have ever seen? Do you work in construction around these kinds of machines? Please share your stories with us here.
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https://youtu.be/CVy2aeLC0ss