First posting, glad to have found this forum. Doing research for a book, and would very much like to know how much it costs to move an off road dump truck. First, about how much would it cost to move a more standard off-road model like the CAT 775? Distance matters obviously, but a couple of forinstances would meet my needs. A couple few hundred miles say? Also would be very useful to know how much it would cost to relocate a big quarry machine like the Cat 797 that needs to be disassembled and moved and reassembled, say, 500 miles away. really hoping someone here is able and willing to make an educated guess. I only need a very rough guess. I sure would appreciate it. Don’t really know where else to turn on this.
Just for trucking, or the probably 2-3 days to take them apart, and 2-3 more to put back together? How about the cost for the at least 50T crane that will have to sit there waiting to load the parts? I'm not sure what you're hoping to project with your book, but machines like these are/were never meant to ride anywhere but up and down the haul road in a mine. If you absolutely have to have a WAG, I'm going to say probably knocking on $50k to move either of these 500 miles.
Nige could tell you. He’s done a lot of that.
That^ the 797 bed is usually sent out in 3 pieces, the chassis is empty and all the guts and axles and tires get loaded on site. Nige has supervised this process many times.
A small quarry here bought a large Cat dump truck i have saw it but cant remember the number. They cut the bed in half to move it . They got it back together but i dont think they have used it much. I think anyone could have saw it wasnt going to be a good deal.
The roads or highways govern the cost of moving big rigs, because the wider the roads and the less the infrastructure, the lower the cost of moving them, as you can then move them without major component dismantling. Here in Australia we move a very sizeable amount of big equipment, largely in one piece, because we have wide roads, a generally low level of old infrastructure, not a lot of waterways, and overpasses designed to take big loads. Where an overpass is inadequate strength, a bypass around the overpass is often found. The biggest trucks usually have the dump bodies removed, and sometimes wheels/tyres are removed, but the truck itself is largely left intact. However, it's not cheap to move big equipment. Mostly two pilot vehicles, sometimes up to four, sometime a Police escort. Permits have to be worked out in detail, and permits cost money. Our State Police have now basically retired from oversize escort work to concentrate on policing crims, and the Govt has set up "Traffic Escort Wardens" to relieve the escort load on the Police. The TEW's are trained up by ex-Police officers experienced in traffic control, and they are provided with specialist escort vehicles. The big trucks and high capacity trailers (most often, widening trailers, or platform trailers) are big dollars, and cost big money to run. $20 to $30 a km is quite often a basic cost, and then TEW's, cranes, and provision of services (utilities) personnel to check out operating clearances to infrastructure, or holding up wires, are all extra costs.
It almost never happens. Trucks of that size are bought and work out their lives on a specific mine site. To move a 797 (depending on local highway regulations/restrictions) in a worst-case scenario even the body might have to be cut apart to transport it. The chassis would also need a lot of disassembly (a minimum of tyres, the rear axle, front struts, cab, fuel & hyd tanks just for a start). Considering the level of disassembly required, craneage, transport costs, & labour I would be surprised if a 797 could be moved 500 miles for much less than $1 million. Something like a 775 would be far easier. It would probably fit complete on a lowboy with only the inside rear tyres removed beforehand and then the fronts removed to get the height of the dump body canopy down once the truck was on board the lowboy. As regards what that would cost, no idea. EDIT: When we moved 797s we used to drive them..... This particular route was about 130km from the mine to our shop.
Thanks Nige.
Guess what it really boils down to is it really depends on where point A is in relation to point B!
We moved 777s from the main branch to the mine site with the truck chassis on one lowboy, the bed on another, and two highway patrol escorts keeping the two lanes of the interstate blocked behind them to prevent idiots from trying to pass the trucks which were splitting the lanes
If it was a walking dragline like Mr Tom you just take a stroll. No lowboys needed. Drummond Co. brings a monster machine back to life as Alabama's mining industry looks to be reborn When metalurgical coal prices spiked in 2011, many coal companies set in motion investments in infrastructure, but was it too much too late? An 8 million-pound dragline crane, Mr. Tom, will be in place just north of Abernant just when the market is in a hole. www.al.com
About the time they walked that 1450, they shot the booms out of the 1270 and 1370 draglines near me. I used to take visitors for a flight around the mine and booms. That is the most common end for unused mining equipment. I see there are a few of the 1370's in Oz.
While testing some placer claims in the Yukon in 2015 I heard the sound of a dozer approaching my camp on the Dominion creek road. A gentleman had been hired to walk the dozer (I think a D8H) over 50km as the owner wanted to save lowbedding costs!
What with the fuel and undercarriage wear it probably cost more to walk it 50km than it would’ve done to put it on a lowboy.
That’s what I was thinking. Seemed a crazy idea!
I've sneaked through a mile of orchards once with a 175B to mine some topsoil, with permission of course. It was on the north slope of the Cowiche bluff, and the wind blew in dozens of feet of dust from the ice ages. The bluff edge was a hard basalt lava flow, and the pockets in the side of it filled in over tens of thousands of years.
Around about 1970, while I was doing military service and the brother was running our contracting business on his own, he ended up working around Kalgoorlie. He picked a good dozing job for a nickel exploration company that was operating about 150 miles E of Kalgoorlie, and so he set off with one of our D6C's loaded on our ancient ex-military converted tank carrier that we had at that time, to carry our dozers. The road from Kalgoorlie to Edjudina is not exactly a highway today - but in 1970, it was generous to call it a goat track. Washouts, corrugations (washboard), and a generally shocking surface condition saw the poor old tank carrier break in half, right in front of the tandem bogie! Of course, it didn't help that during the conversion, of the old Trailmobile 4DT, "single row of 8" tank carrier, to a standard tandem duals arrangement - the people who had carried out the conversion, decided to install a bogie arrangement that was unsprung! This meant all road shocks went straight through to the frame. As soon as the brother was aware that the old tank carrier had developed major frame damage, he had little choice, but to unload the D6C, and start "walking" her to the jobsite - which was still 54 miles away! It took over a day, but he got there O.K., and the D6C possibly incurred a bit of track wear in the process - but there was no alternative, the chances of sourcing another contractor with a suitable trailer to carry the D6C in that era and that region, were extremely low! The best part was, the job paid handsomely (as the company was struggling to get any contractor, thanks to the remoteness of the site), so the profits more than covered repairs to the old tank carrier - and she lived to see another day! Amazingly, we retired the old tank carrier to our scrapyard in the wheatbelt in 1974, when we bought a new trailer - but about 8 years later, another farmer/contractor walked in, and asked if he could buy it, as he wanted something to carry his D7E! We were quite amazed at this guy wanting to acquire and rebuild our ancient old wreck of a Trailmobile tank carrier - but we were even more amazed when we caught up with him later and found he'd re-engineered it again into a fully compliant, roadworthy, tri-axle!! That trailer still exists today! - thus proving that WW2 stuff was built to last!
That's a fine story and worthy of your name My longest walk was a 345 excavator, about 4 mi up Stevens canyon in Mt. Rainier National Park. It was all pavement.
I miss the sweet smell of cold rain, fresh cut old-growth, leaking hydraulic oil and steaming final drives of the shovel loggers, grinding their way up steep shot rock logging roads of SE. Walking them for miles & burning off those under carriages. Cha-Ching $$$
Can't tell a story like that and not post pics of the tank carrier.
That's both cool and painful to watch.
Sadly, I had a house fire in 1982 where I lost the vast majority of my photos - a very distressing event. Only one photo of the old tank carrier survived, and it's not a real good one. It doesn't show the tandem axles setup, which were made by using something like heavy drill rod for axles! The International R190 was our first truck - a true gas guzzler with the RD406! The toddler playing with the steering wheel is 57 this year! The D6C is half-hidden in the background - and the Landrover trayback was the cheapest 4WD we could buy! It was originally purchased new by a farmer in 1960, and we bought it with 34,000 miles on it in 1967. The towed implement on the trailer is a locally-built stump ripper, we have a lot of stumps in the original wheatbelt vegetation, from dwarf eucalypts called Mallee trees. Ripping them out saved a lot of damage to cultivation equipment. You can find photos of the original Trailmobile DT4 on the WW2 military sites on the 'net. Reo 28XS in Russian service - MLU FORUM Reo 28XS in Russian service The Softskin Forum mapleleafup.net The Trailmobile was originally 9' 6" wide - ours was cut down to the regulation 8' 0" wide so it could be legally road registered.
Your "stump ripper", did it just have ripper shanks? No wings or blades between them, ie blade plough? Or weren't they invented yet?
No, the ripper only had simple shanks with replaceable tips. The idea of wings or the blade plough design was far into the future, and not thought of in the early 1960's. The Mallee stumps don't have the problem with a massive root system, as you have with a lot of Qld native scrub - the Mallee only has a large bulbous stump with a few short heavy roots, and a lot of really fine roots that don't cause any major problem with cultivation. The company that made these Mallee stump rippers (or Mallee roots, as they're known locally), was a company called Pederick Engineering, who were agricultural equipment manufacturers. They're still operating today, but they have moved their business location. They formerly occupied a big number of industrial buildings in a town called Wagin in the Great Southern wheatbelt area - but in the 1980's they almost went bankrupt, thanks to a surge in imports, high interest rates and a change in farm equipment required (they weren't manufacturing what was in demand at the time). So they moved to another town (Darkan) and re-invented themselves and got some more financial backing and they seem to be chugging along quite happily today. They still build a ripper - but the current machine is a deep ripper, designed to break up hardpan. There's no need for Mallee rippers any more here, all the land that is going to be cleared, has been cleared - and it's virtually impossible to acquire a permit to clear any remaining native vegetation. Gallery | Agricultural Equipment | Pederick Engineering www.pederickengineering.com.au
793s are routinely moved between mines out here. Each truck requires about six loads - the frame (including engine and torque converter), bed, rear axle, front struts, tires, and cab are all shipped separately. It's surprising how compact the frame and powertrain are by themselves. 777s and smaller are shipped essentially assembled. Unfortunately they represent a serious road hazard as many highways here lack shoulders in places and DPS escorts clear the route by sweeping across the centerline to run other traffic off the road.
Somewhere I have photos of us moving 793s in one piece on a lowboy without removing the dump body. I’ll have to look for them.
Here's a 777 I hauled into the Cat dealer from a quarry about 12 miles away 2007?. About 17' square. This one pulled double bottom dumps. The Cost? The 3 CHP escorts cost more than my 2 hour truck time. 3 CHP units was around $900, truck was around $400, 2 pilot cars $100.IIRC. 1 county permit @$35. Took 2 hours. 2 lane county road, 2 CHPs in front, moving traffic off the road. CHP made it easy....
Kind of like a beam trailer for the front axle!
I remember watching this on a TV show. It can be done. Looks fairly straight forward. If you really want to see something Mammoet transported an 820 Tonne vessel longer than a football field. I think it averaged about 2 miles an hour. Fully assembled Cat 797 transport | Mammoet news First time that this type of transport was done by Mammoet. www.mammoet.com Transporting Cat 797s | Mammoet case study A new idea that allowed the transport of vehicles in one piece. www.mammoet.com
Any chance you might have any photos of the double bottom dumps? Thanks again
Seeing as this thread popped up again I actually remembered to go looking for the photos this time.........