From mining the oil sands of Alberta to boring under the English Channel, some of the most extreme machines made by man are devoted to digging. We take a look at six of the biggest monsters of earth moving.
BY JEREMY REPANICH
Metso Corporation
Metso Mobile Crusher
As other machines dig and move the material around, mobile crushers make the rubble easier to handle and transport away from a site. One of the largest mobile crushers on the market is Metso's Lokotrak LT160, which can crush up to 1550 tons per hour of rock or concrete and can handle 1-cubic-meter-size boulders. Metso designed the machine with tank-like tracks so it could more easily traverse the rough terrain in quarries and mines, moving around a site to where it's most needed. The nearly 64-foot-long, 11.5-foot-wide, 12.5-foot-tall LT160 has a 27-cubic-yard hopper that feeds into a V-shaped jaw crusher, which uses a moving plate to pulverize rock and concrete against a stationary one, with pieces falling to a conveyor below once they are small enough. With the material now broken down, it makes it easier for trucks like the Caterpillar 797F to haul it away from the site.
