Wanted to share a few pics from when I was in the Komatsu mining truck manufacturing facility. This facility is in Peoria on the west side of the river just a few blocks north of downtown.
Some assembly required, I love it!
Nice pictures! Looks like a 830E-AC. Never been to the Peoria facility, would love to go.
The truck outside was a HD1500-7 and the ones inside were either 830's or 930's
Very nice pictures! Thanks for sharing.
I wonder how long it takes from start to finish and how many men have worked on it.
Complete assembly time was just a few days but you have to remember everything comes in as assemblies. Number of people in assembly....if I remember right it was about 20 give or take a few.
20 people working on one truck! Guess one of them is basically a traffic cop! Also must have all the right lifting tools and a step by step procedure from the factory. Not like they just dump the parts on the ground and say "There You Go Have Fun!" That would be like where I worked. Hardware would be in buckets half filled with water and the critical ones would be missing.
20 sounds like a lot to me unless they are working on more than 1 chassis simultaneously. IIRC the large Cat truck chassis assembly - effectively what you see in the last 2 photos in post #2 above - was done by about 6 people. On site we would have a team of 5 guys, one of whom was a working supervisor, plus a crane operator running the RT crane & forklift to assemble a truck that size.
I was wondering after I posted if the OP meant that's how many people at the factory worked on it to get it to the point of the last picture. Agree it a lot smaller truck, our 773G, but when it was delivered the dealer sent out two guys and there were a couple factory rep's wandering around checking on things the factory guys may have done wrong, they had a whole list of things like hose hold downs and zip-ties. Oh there was the dealers salesman but we all know how much work he did, well he did bring coffee and doughnuts the day I was there!
If you come to Peoria to look at the Komatchu plant, make sure you go a couple blocks over and take a look at the new Caterpillar museum, they have a couple of those simulators in there :drinkup oh and a 797F inside
Oh, forgot to mention it in the last post, but that super long building that Komatsu is in was built by R.G. LeTourneau back in the 1930's. He said in his book how they built it 300' long, then when they were done with that they added another 300' to the one end, then another 300', iirc its around 1,200' long now.
Are they still using the Tourneucranes to put the stuff together with?
There are 3 Toruneaucranes that sit down there still, they are usually in different spots whenever I go by, so I would assume that they still use them for something?
Believe it or not, it's actually about 1600' long now.