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BIG MUSKIE
Big Muskie
was a coal mining dragline excavator owned by the
Central Ohio Coal Company. The gigantic machine stood
nearly 22 stories tall and weighed 12,200 tons. Its twin
boom was 330 feet long. The 220-cubic-yard bucket alone
equaled 12-car garage and could hold two Greyhound
buses. Big Muskie was the largest single-bucket digging
machine ever created and one of the world's largest
mobile earth-moving machines.
The
machine was so large it was necessary to ship the
components to the coal mining customer in Ohio and erect
the machine on site. It took 340 rail cars and 260
trucks to ship all of the components and 200,000 man
hours to construct over a period of about two years.
Big Muskie
cost $25 million in 1969, the equivalent of about $200
million today. While working, Big Muskie used the
equivalent of the power for 27,500 homes, costing tens
of thousands of dollars an hour just in power costs. The
machine had a crew of five, and worked around the clock,
with special emphasis on night work since the per
kilowatt-hour rate was much cheaper.
Big Muskie
walked! Once it had stripped all the overburden in one
area of the pit, it could move itself up to 1 mile to
another pre-prepared digging position. This ability was
made possible by massive hydraulic walker feet. The
mammoth Big Muskie traveled very slowly, at 105 inches
per minute and required a carefully graded travelway
with a roadbed of heavy wooden beams to avoid sinking
into the soil.
Big Muskie
operated in Ohio from 1969 to 1991. During its 22 years
of service, he removed more than 608,000,000 cubic yards
(465,000,000 m3) of overburden, twice the amount of
earth moved during the construction of the Panama Canal,
uncovering over 20,000,000 tonnes of Ohio brown coal.
Shut down
in 1991, “Big Muskie” was finally dismantled for scrap
in 1999. The only component saved was the bucket, which
was later incorporated into a display about the machine
and surface mining and reclamation in Miners Memorial
Park in McConnelsville, Ohio.
This primarily wood and metal Big Muskie model
is 1/144 scale, a little
over 3' in length. Please email us for price and lead
time. Note that due to the structure of this model, we
will have to ship the cranes detached from the body. You
will need to spend several hours to run the rope.
Learn more about the BIG MUSKIE here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Muskie
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