Heavy Equipment

Heavy Equipment

Review...[an] enticing, jumbo-size book... -- Entertainment WeeklyThe subtitle of this enticing, jumbo-size book-the perfect antidote to our modern obsession with pocket-size fripperies-is itself too massive to spell out. Just know that each 13 1/2"-square page is splashed with big pictures, chunks of text, and lots of info about earthshaking inventions past and present in which size really does matter: beauties including hydraulic excavators, asphalt compactors, combine harvesters, stripping shovels, and rotary blast drills. How do mobile cranes compare with freestanding tower cranes? Bruun and Keith are glad you asked. -- Entertainment Weekly, 7/24/98A super-colossal book for grown-ups, this awe-inspiring album is packed with full-color close-ups of massive dump trucks, huge bulldozers, immense tree shredders, and dozens of other super-large machines used in mining, construction, tunnels, drilling, farming, forestry, and recycling. Descriptions of how they work and what they do bring readers right to the construction site.From Scientific AmericanA big book (133/4 inches square) describes big machines, providing eye-popping pictures of the monsters at work and good explanations of how they lift, dig, crush, mine, push earth and carry huge loads. One learns that the Komatsu 575A-2, pictured on page 21, is the world's largest bulldozer, capable of moving 90 cubic yards of dirt with a single shove. And that a massive, electric mining shovel needs a 7,200-volt power supply and, working 450 hours a month, will consume 430,000 kilowatts of electricity at a cost of $30,000. David J. Bowler, who operates several kinds of heavy equipment, gives the reader a sense of the skill and care required: "The day I think I know everything about running a crane is the day I'm going to get into trouble. Every job is different. You've got to know your load and you've got to know the machine's limit."From the Inside FlapCrushing and dredging, pulverizing and transporting, heavy equipment has lifted, rolled, and hauled its way through history. From the building of Pyramids and early Roman roads, to the Panama Canal and the Channel Tunnel, colossal structures have been poured, framed, and erected over thousands of years. The equipment used to create these immense wonders is itself dazzling in its size, power, and strength.This eye-popping pictorial albulm inspects and digs into the most magnificant pieces of heavy equipment ever built. The book explores six different industries (construction, mining, tunnels/drilling, farming and forestry, recycling, and aeronautics).Each spread contains stories abut the machines' creation or evolution; the facts about size power; and the economics of manufacturing and running this equipment, with enormity comparisons that abound throughout the book that illustrate the massiveness, height, weight, and strength of these mechanisms.Through these dynamic pages enter the big Brutus Mining Shovel that now stands as a museum in the United States of America; learn how the NASA Crawler/Transporter pulls the Space Shuttle to its launch pad, turning all gravel and rock in its path to sand; see the drill bit used to dig the Channel Tunnel; witness the overwhelming size of the 300-ton Komatsu 930E dump truck, and much, much more. There is also an adden-dum chapter on the fictional heavy equipment used in Star Trek, Star Wars, Aliens, and the Flintsones.Experience the evolution of dump trucks, tracters, drills, and trenchers from their simplest design to their most complex detail. Caterpillar, John Deere, and Komatsu are a few of the heavy equipment manufacturers featured that lead the industry in design, technology, and production.Mankind's ongoing quest to control and master the elements - water, rock, trees, and dirt - is examined on these pages. The methods of our development and progress as a society are laid out and demonstrated on these huge, colorful pages. Pull up to these big rigs