Monster Mining Machines - How Draglines Work 

Man they keep the old girl looking good. Inside and out. Draglines are way cool. Makes those little 3/4 yard machines I used to operate look very insignificant. Thanks Aaron for doing what you do. For an old gear head it's fun to watch. Cheers

What impresses me the most are the engineers who designed this monster and also created machines to make the parts for this.

Awesome video. As a retired heavy equipment operator i don't think i would last long doing that unless the pay was real good. After running a excavator for years loading on and off road trucks this would make my brain rot fast .The boredom is hard to overcome. And the machine actually runs on coal , because without coal .... theres no electricity.

1:54 That machine is 106 days short of operating 10,000 days. The most custom piece besides the bucket is the drive gear. I wonder how many individual sections it was cast in and if any of the sections of drive gear have been replaced.

I was fortunate enough to work 7 shifts of Big Muskie only 4 months before she was decommissioned. A true behemoth!

re reference, the machine hours indicates that one particular machine has been running for 28 years of its 40 year life span. WOW

Everybody gangsta until the drag line starts WALKING...

the efficiency of these machines is so cool

Awesome video, impressive point of view. 👌

Nothing quite like the intertwining of man & machine feels so natural. The perfect bond

This is such a cool video. I worked for a heavy engineering company in Australia in the 70's called Perry Engineering. I operated a Skoda horizontal floor borer that machined the gear boxes and swing shafts for draglines.

Awesome video brought back alot of good memories i got to run a drag line half that size at a limestone quarry in central Illinois that my dad worked at when i was a freshman in highschool it was an awesome experience

It’s like moving a whole factory around.

Great video aaron❤️

this is actually epic i would love to have your job aaron 👍great vids love the content keep it up

I was lucky enough to not only get to see one of these in person but the guy knew the driver so he stopped the machine and let us onboard. The sensation of being in the cab while its swinging around and throwing its bucket is wild. So much weight

Great video

Hey man. My name is Matt. I was the Project Manager for rebuilding the boom on this 10 years ago. Have some cool photos and videos of it.

The bucket and the amount of dirt it holds is tiny compared to the size of the machine. Just shows how difficult it is to move the earth

my dad made the main spool drive gears (amongst other parts) for drag lines like these back in the 80's and they're still out there running today!

Next time your up at Coteau, ask to see the coal handling facility and ask to maybe tag along with the dragline maintenance guys.

Awesome video... thanks for sharing 🇲🇨🚜🚛❤️🌼👍👍

My father ran a drainage earth moving business and operated draglines, not like the size of this beauty of course. A dragline was one of the most difficult earth moving machines I've ever had to learn how to operate, my father could make a dragline sing, they were an awesome machine in there day and still have there uses even today. Cheers for the great reel.

I worked in a open cast in yorkshire UK. We had a Rapier W2000 called Big Bob

Love ur videos bro keep it up 💯

GREAT STUFF AND POWERFUL CREATING 😊😊😊😊😊

Amazing machine

I've worked around 9800 diggers, 930 haul trucks and all the rest but these things are Goliath's!

You must be a lucky guy to be in one 👍👍👍

Best video yet I wish you could just do videos of draglines and large excavators

Good show, Aaron. We had one on the last job that I was on. Nothing as big as that one. Thanks for sharing and have a great weekend!!

Really enjoyed that video Aaron.bit differant to the volvo ecr25 I run in the uk

Well you sort of got one thing wrong. I guess they didn't tell you, that if you were standing on the very end of the boom, when its swinging you'd be travelling between 60 - 80 miles per hour !!! Thats pretty damn fast for an earth moving machine!

Woww.... Amazing

I love drag lines

Hello i'm from the biggest production indonesian coal mining " berau coal ". I always watch your videos and fantastic experience about coal mining in the europe one day i would like to works there are

Wish I could give 10k thumbs up for this one!!! AWESOME VIDEO, THANK YOU!

Working on a floating (3m^3) grab dredge everyting seemed big to me on my machine... and then I see this ;)

Worked around 2 diff ones here in eastern Ky…ones in the coal mining in Appalachia vid and the other I think went to Florida yrs ago

Started Peabody Coal 1978 had 8800 Marion 100Yd Homestead Mine Western KY . 1050BE shovel really cool for 18 year old .

Thanks aaron

son unas máquinas fantásticas, y más en sus mantenimientos, en el balde, cambios de cables y pines, en el boom y ni se diga en las partes internas, revolfren y Center pin, en los zapatos, toda una locura realizar trabajos de soldadura en esa areas.

The reliability of that machine is the most amazing part. To operate for 40 years is just NUTS!!

It's a shame not many of these machines of this size exist anymore.

A mate of mine who is a welder told me that when the drag lines moved position in Mt Isa Australia, the entire town's electrical supply would 'brown out' as it did so.....

Your best video to date 🎉

Thank you! I always had a strange fascination with all the big machines with rooms inside of them!

Aaron, that is absolutely cool! Got to see more of the "guts" of a dragline like this with you than elsewhere, thanks!

Its crazy that this machine is pretty much like a building that moves. These machines are insane feats of engineering

Well thank you for this video. For many years my Company (Monitek) performed vibration analysis on these machines in coal mines throughout Australia, the purpose being to detect the early warning signs of wear (defects) in the many large bearings and gears driving them, thus allowing corrective maintenance to be performed before a catastrophic and very expensive failure occured. One of our employees later emigrated to the USA and set up a sister company in Wyoming to service the coal mines in the region. Never thought I would see this sort of detail on RU-vid.

Up here they walked "The Anthracite King" some crazy distances, Some of it to do the cut for RT 81

Shame they don't make 'em as big as Big Muskie anymore.

Like driving a freakin appartment bloc. Day-um. 😂

Lov it

This can be called a building. 凄い！😱

Something i always wondered (also with our huge buckewheel ones here in germany) is how they are build in the first place, because good gods these things are MASSIVE

An engineering marvel.

Wow. Incredible

It doesn't matter how many times I watch videos like this on massive mining machines I'm still totally gob smacked and amazed by these huge masterpieces, and huge amounts of respect to America and the guy's who operates these giants because America is never out done when it comes to massive mining machines ❤❤🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

Thanks! That's Cool..

Amazingly quiet for how big it is.

This is just so incredible .. Thank you for showing this to us.

Awesome video, such a cool machine.

Thanks for the info

Honestly with how big they are, i teally did expect the bucket to be bigger. Not many? Gotta be more than 50 in australia i think. Thats heaps.

Back in the late '60's we were fishing near the open pit coal mines around Wilmington IL. There was an immense dragline there, and we were invited to tour the machine. My father drove our Plymouth station wagon into the scoop of the dragline and there was enough room for another station wagon next to our car.

Really gotta give these guys credit. No wind power machine could make it possible to live 24/7 the way we do. Great video. Thanks for sharing.

I bought one of those last week to dig my pond. Enjoying the comfort of the cab.

Whoever design, engineer and build these machines. Salut to you all!

Matt from Diesel Creek should buy this.

Thanks for the video. Interesting! Three other questions: 1) Do the booms move? 2) how much does this machine weigh? 3) How much does this machine cost?

This machinery is sci-fi like makes me think of an army of these mining the surface of a foreign planet for its resources. How cool and terrifying!

The sound it makes when "walking" is awesome, like out of a transformer movie

FINALLY!! I LOVE WALKING DRAGLINES! 😅

I’ve been inside that same bucket. Machine was down for a rare moment of maintenance so we got to tour the entire machine in and out.

Thanks again buildwitt. What a incredable machine.

Its pacific rim in real life! Very cool. I always loved books about super heavy equipment

Love the video, but could you please include the metric equivalent on the screen as well?

It's like a warehouse with extra functions. When you're a piece of equipment has a kitchen in it you know it's big

Awesome video 😊

I would love to see how they are manufactured and assembled on site.

I cant fathom how big that machine is 😊

Incredible, it is rare to see the inner workings of drag line.

Very interesting machine ,thank you for showing us the work of those important people.

Bro, come to SW Florida! We have TONS of smaller draglines for sand and phosphate mining!

Amazing machine... D10 looks like a Tonka toy...

215 Ton bucket scoop.. MAD AZ

Imagine what a person from, say, 1750 (at the start of the industrial revolution) would say/think when seeing one of these monsters! Or, how Newcomen/Watt/Diesel would react!?

One hundred yards per scoop is about five (18- wheeler) semi-truck loads.

Straight out of high school, I was lucky enough to get a job with P&H doing teardowns and relocating draglines . One of my most memorable greenhorn experiences was having to clear the tub of a BE 8750 compartments of water because the outer access covers weren't properly sealed earlier in the rebuilding process. Every single little room, all the way back to the center pin flooded ,alone with the worst flashlights ever (before waterproof LED)😑. Still have nightmares. I got it done in a few days and my reward for the task was going back through painting and numbering the compartments later on . I knew that tub so well after it all, I could crawl it in the dark, which I often had to because of my flashlight dying. 😅 Good times

I wish you had the lot number of that 2570W I worked for BE from 1976 to 1981in Pocatello building 2570's and other machines. I worked mainly in the draglines doing the paperwork to build them . I probably had a hand in building that Drag. The big swing gear is built in 12 segments, 3 segments is a full semi load because of weight.

I'm curious what the amount of power it takes to run and compared to how much coal it digs. It's always interesting to think about the economies of scale with big equipment. I'd love to see real data on comparisons.

Pretty cool. There used to be draglines all around here in northeast PA. Not that big, some some good size ones. A guy I knew used to operate one, a walking one near Hazleton. He said when it comes to earthmoving, nothing holds a candle to the coal mining industry.

The funny thing is, the bucket looks tiny and cute compared the whole machine lol.

Heaps still working in Central Queensland Australia 🇦🇺 I work on them every other day

40 years of work out of it! probably still being paid for too

All that weight on the center pin in the tub is insane to me.

The company i work for we are making a set of rails and rollers and thrust rails for the 2570 tub.

Bellissimo video complimenti 👍👍👍👍

This is what makes RU-vid