Big trucks, big everything...

Sunday afternoon I met a very interesting guy at Rich and Gloria's backyard barbeque. He is a relative of the groom and he works at the iron mine in the hills outside Marquette. He was originally a heavy equipment mechanic who worked on the ore trucks used in the open pit mine. So I now know what kind of equipment uses those tires that we saw on the 18 wheel flatbed on the way into Las Vegas (remember my first post from the road).

The tires on the ore trucks up at the mine are 11 feet in diameter. That is nearly twice as tall as I am. If you want to see a picture of one, check out this site http://ericbartlett-digitalpics.blogspot.com/2008/02/iron-ore-trucks.html. Awesome trucks!!! Make sure you see the bottom picture on that page.

The fellow I spoke with on Sunday also told me the mine just received the newest and biggest motor grader or scraper that is manufactured by Caterpillar. The first picture you see above is an average run-of-the-mill motor grader that you might see if you are passing some road construction. The one up at the iron mine looks similar, only much, much bigger (see second picture). The one in the first picture has a 10 or 12 foot wide blade while the one at the mine has a 34 foot wide blade. Check out the size relative to the two humans standing in the cabs of each machine.

He now works in plant maintenance where one of his jobs is to "align" electric motors that drive plant equipment. I'm not sure if he was talking about physical alignment of the motors or ensuring that the motors are proper in phase with the electrical input. In any case, the electric motor that he works on is bigger than Rich and Gloria's house, weighs 40,000 lbs. and has an output of 3500 horsepower. The mine has two such motors that drive all the processing machinery.

The iron mine uses more electricity than the city of Green Bay, Wisconsin and has an electric bill of $1.3 million per month. I wonder what the backup generator looks like?

That's some heavy duty equipment. Wow!