Bucket Wheel Excavator
The real one
This kind of Bucket Wheel Excavators work in the open brown coal mines near Aachen, Düsseldorf and Cologne in the far west corner of Germany. They are more then 200 metres long and reach a height about 100 metres. They could mine about 300.000 m³ of brown coal every day.
The total weight is about 13.000 t. Such a machine can only be build up in the mine – this takes about 4 to 5 years.
The real crawlers are 3 metres wide and 30 metres long. The whole excavator has 12 of these crawlers.
More then 1000 wide linked treads were used in the LEGO model. All of them are powerded, but the gears are to weak to move the more then 10 kg heavy machine. In 2008 I've rebuild the drive and now 3 PowerFunction XL motors do their work and finally the monster crawls over the table.
The turn-table has to hold the whole upper construction and should be possible to turn it. The turn-table was designed by Beat Felber, read more about this construction at Engineering with ABS.
Marinus from the Netherlands has finished his fully functional model at the end of 2013, read more at http://www.technicbrickconstructions.nl
Building instructions and part lists
There are no building instructions und part lists available for the models shown on this web site. There are no engineering drawings available. To build the LEGO models only photographs from the real prototypes were used. All models are unique and not for sale.