The Bagger 288 (or Excavator 288) is a giant machine manufactured by the German company Krupp on an order of the mining company Rheinbraun and completed in 1978. It was so large that it took five years to build. design and manufacture, and it will take another 5 years to successfully assemble.

If before, NASA’s specialized conveyor Crawler Transporter (specializing in transporting space shuttles) was ranked No. 1 in terms of the world’s largest self-propelled crawler vehicle, when Bagger 288 was born, it took the throne. king of the old “record holder”.

Bagger 288 has an extremely impressive appearance, it is 240m long, 46m wide and 96m high (equivalent to the height of a 32-story building), if standing next to it, an adult is just like a piece of furniture. play tiny.

This giant machine has an excavator consisting of 18 large buckets, with a volume of 6.6m3, a rotation speed of 48 rpm. It can extract about 240,000 m3 of soil and rock/day and night and load them into more than 2,500 large trucks. To make it easier to imagine, that rock is enough to bury a standard football field to a depth of 30m.

In addition, Bagger 288 has a total weight of up to 13,500 tons, equivalent to about 293 T90 super tanks (about 46 tons).

Although equipped with a large capacity engine, because it is quite bulky and very heavy, to ensure safety, Bagger only has a maximum speed of 10m / min, far behind other giant machines. , for example NASA Crawler Transporter with 3.2km/h.

In fact, with just focusing on the main job of mining a large mine, the slow movement speed does not affect this machine too much.

Up to now, Bagger 288 has only had to move from mine to mine once to be able to continue working, in 2001. That is when it had to leave the Tagebau Hambach mine in western Germany after 13 years. exploit to conquer a new challenge called Garzweiler 22km away.

Unable to dismantle and take to a new location because it takes too much time and cost, the only way is that Bagger 288 has to walk on its own “legs”. With a speed of 10m/min, it took 3 weeks to conquer 22km with the control, support of nearly 100 people and more than 8 million dollars in costs.

Close-up of the power of the giant Bagger 288 machine:

Bagger 288 – The world’s largest self-propelled machine