The Silver Spade - Last Day of Operation 

Machines like these serve as inventive inspiration to encourage younger generations to strive further and to take pride in doing a good job

Even if they retired it they should have restored all the metal on it and a park built around it!, pictures might be worth a 1,000 words, but it's different to stand next to a machine like this and get a picture!, all we have now is the bucket in a park!.

The 4 largest draglines were Big Brutus which is 160 feet tall, Marion 6360 also known as The Captain which was 210 feet tall, The Silver Spade which was 220 feet tall and Big Muskie which was 222 feet tall. Out of the 4 largest draglines, only one lived and that was Big Brutus.

Sucker was so big you couldn't miss it. Could see it miles away if no hills blocking.

Does Russia have comparable shovels or draglines like the Silver Spade? Or does Russia do underground mining?

@@BlackPill-pu4vi Yes, Russia has the big draglines and excavators, but they are not like the Silver Spade.

Awesome info!

Where are you operating at? I work for Komatsu direct who now owns Joy Global (who owned P&H) and I've been building 58 and 64 yards to dig in the oilsands up here in Canada. I keep seeing / hearing about dippers up into the 96 yard range and I guess coal is lighter than oil to dig, but its always fascinating to see the bigger buckets or the smaller buckets on the BOSS shovels.

Wish I could have seen it. I grew up in Ames Iowa, and Hallett Materials had a Page crane. It was no Big Muskie or Silver Spade, but it had a 471 2 stroke Detroit engine for each foot a to walk with. Same story, it got a big crack in it and she was history.

+jakestree1 You're joking right, I've run AC 41's and Cat D11's and there is no comparison. The Cat runs circles around the AC even after they became FA or Fiat Allis back in the 70's.

Amen 16v71 look out

Most of it was scrapped. Some parts were saved as the centerpiece of a museum.

Yes , it’s called a bucket wheel excavator.

+Soo Line Not to be rude, this is the full list of reasons why that is a bad idea. 1. Most large mining operations generate their own power, so are not on the public electrical grid to begin with. 2. Bringing generators on board to generate power locally would also require fuel to be stored on board. 3. Storing fuel on board and generators would cut down on the shovels load capacity or how much it dirt it could move with every scoop. 4. The point behind these shovels is that they move more dirt more efficiently then smaller equipment, reducing payload capacity to house fuel would drastically reduce this capacity and a cost benefit analysis would have to be done to decide if they are worth having. (they usually are not) 5. Increased maintenance on the piece of machinery, a damaged generator would mean an outage and lost production time. This is what we are constantly fighting in the industry. 6. You have to stop to refuel the machine periodically and I for one do not want to see the cost in diesel to run one of these machines. 7. Having to fuel these machines brings fuel trucks into close proximity of these machines in the mines, they cannot just drive out of the pits they are in, and would constitute an increased risk to operator safety. 8. Refueling these machines would be a long and costly operation because of lost production time and the cost of fuel. 9. As it stands the only complication with moving and operating a purely electric shovel is moving around their power cable. The shovel usually does this itself by picking up its own cable with its dipper. (bucket) 10. It is often cheaper to pay for electricity then to pay for fuel, and most companies can write off part of this bill as a cost of doing business (tax loop.) They are by no means paying for electricity for the prices we the normal consumer are paying for it, and what they do pay is again subsidized and written off. I hope this clears some things up. People asked me why our 4100 doesn't have its own generators on board and these are the reasons why.

@@BType13X2 do y'all have plans on trying to save at least part of y'alls 4100 ?

@@RailPreserver2K That really depends on the Oil Companies themselves the preserved #5 Dragline out at Syncrude when they were decommissioning their old fleet as well as a Bucketwheel. I think that they probably will because the 4100's have done more ore processing than any other piece of mining machinery for them. And right now we have a few machines that are approaching their end of operational life and are looking to be replaced with something that has only existed on paper up until this point. We will be assembling something bigger than the 4100 starting in June/ July this year. So to answer your question in a roundabout way, when they hit retirement hours on the first of their fleet it'd be up to the oil company or operator to preserve it. We just manufacture/ fix the machinery so we can't make that call.

@@BType13X2 well, you could ask them to send out a survey/petition to see if the people want it preserved

@@BType13X2 long shot but did the machine on paper end up getting built?

It was cut Up for scrap and melted down

The cab and bucket still exist