Extreme Heavy Vehicles For Satisfyingly Specific Jobs

A worker is only as good as his tools, and if you want to clear away snow or cut down a forest, there’s a vehicle out there that’s made to help you get the job done. Let's explore some of those specialized vehicles, as we dig a trench, haul a spaceship and clear a minefield, by checking out some extreme heavy vehicles for satisfyingly specific jobs!

WW2 Mine Flail Tank

In WW2, when the allies stormed Normandy and started moving in to reclaim France, there was a problem. They discovered that their path was blocked by 6.5 million landmines stretching from Southern France to Norway. Detecting and removing mines with a handheld metal detector is a long and dangerous process, but luckily, the allies had a heavy vehicle made for this task: the mine flail tank!

You wouldn’t want to stand near that when it spins up! That vehicle was first developed by a South African Captain called Abraham du Toit, who invented it during the battle for North Africa in 1942. Tanks are usually used to blow up the enemy, but those giant vehicles used spinning chains to smash down on the ground and detonate mines hidden under the surface.

Because the flail was held out in front of the tank, the mines exploded at a relatively safe distance away from its body, as the vehicle cleared a path through the battlefield for the infantry following behind. Those tanks were instrumental in clearing mines in France in 1944, which allowed the allies to retake Europe.

However, modern day mine clearing tanks are even faster and more effective. The M11-50 Assault Breacher Vehicle is based on the body of a standard M1 Abrams tank. However, it swaps the big gun for a plow that digs up hidden mines and shunts them out of the way to clear a safe path.

1,500HP M1 Assault Breacher in Work by Military Archive

The vehicle is also equipped with a mine-clearing line charge, which is essentially a long rope that’s filled with 1,750lbs of C4 explosives. That rocket propelled explosive rope costs nearly $8,000 to fire, and the tank can launch it 300ft over the battlefield. Once the rope has landed on the ground, the tank’s crew can manually detonate the explosives along its length, which blows up any mines hidden under the surface.

Spider Excavator

Ever wondered how to use an excavator on the side of a mountain? I assume you haven’t but a worker was spotted digging into the side of a steep slope to pre-emptively loosen mudslide-prone ground, by dangling a tracked excavator over the edge with some ultra-heavy duty steel cables.

Admittedly, that excavator features a hydraulic system allowing it to elevate its body at the required angle for slope-work. But, another heavily-specialized vehicle can perform similarly-precarious tasks a lot more easily.

The Spider Excavator can’t shoot webs, but the machine does have four articulated legs that let it climb much steeper terrain than a standard excavator. Each hydraulic leg is individually-powered, and the driver can control each one separately with a system of pedals and joysticks.

That makes the vehicle incredibly complicated to drive, but it also gives it the flexibility to negotiate 60 degree slopes and wade through water up to 5ft deep. It’s also able to perform specialized jobs like digging flat sections into steep slopes so buildings can be constructed on hillsides, or climbing into a blocked river and redirecting the course of the water.

If you tried to perform especially waterlogged or steep-angled jobs in a standard excavator you’d usually have to either carefully dig out your own road across the steep slope first, or be suspended from above on cables. But the sure-footed spider excavators can go anywhere, anytime.

Pioneering Spirit

Our next insane vehicle is The Pioneering Spirit, a ship that’s specially designed to carry deep-ocean oil rigs. The vehicle is the heaviest ship in the world, and it installs and removes the rigs like a giant forklift truck, using a split hull with a gap in the middle. Incredibly, it can lift a 24,000 ton rig in 10 seconds, and its maximum lift-weight is 48,000 tons, which is 2000 tons more than the Titanic.

To remove a rig, the Pioneering Spirit starts by letting seawater into a ballast tank which causes the entire ship to sink lower into the ocean. Then, after it positions the oil rig inside its split hull, 16 lifting arms move underneath the rig and attach themselves to it with huge clamping pistons. At that point, the ship releases the water from the ballast tank while the arms simultaneously lift the rig out of the water, allowing the Pioneering Spirit to carry it back to shore.

The ship cost $2.8 billion to build, which is pretty steep. But when an oil well runs dry, rigs need to be removed, and before the Pioneering Spirit existed companies would perform the job by chopping the rig into pieces and taking them back to shore with a whole fleet of smaller ships. In contrast, the Pioneering Spirit is far more efficient, as it lifts those 48,000 ton structures in one swift motion and carries them around like a big metallic baby.

Pile-Driver

Let’s move from vehicles that lift things up, to one that’s designed to push things into the ground. A pile-driver is a devastating wrestling vehicle that’s used to hammer gigantic beams called piles into the ground. Sometimes, a building needs to be constructed on soft earth that’s too weak to take its weight.

So, long piles are pushed into the ground until they reach a tougher layer of soil or rock that’s more secure. Then, the building is built on top of the piles, as the tougher ground they’re sitting on offers a more stable structural foundation.

Most pile-drivers install those beams by lifting a heavy weight into the air, before dropping it on top of the pile to force it into the ground. They might lift the weight using hydraulics or a diesel engine, but the principle’s basically the same, as they function like a supersized hammer.

Other piling vehicles like the Morris-Shea CFA piling rig work like a giant drill, as they create a hole in the ground with a spinning auger, before filling it with liquid concrete that will solidify into a strong pile. It’s much quieter than smashing piles in with a giant mallet, and the Morris-Shea can easily drill 165-foot deep shafts in the ground to support entire buildings.

Morris-Shea CFA Continuous Flight Auger Pile by Morris-Shea Bridge Co.

NASA Crawler

Our next vehicle is, weighing in at 3,300 tons the reigning, defending Super-heavyweight Champion of the Transporter World! The NASA Crawler-Transporter!

When it’s time to launch a rocket at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, NASA need to transport their spacecraft from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch site. That job is carried out by two gigantic transporters called Hans and Franz, who ferry rockets down a 4.2 mile connecting road called the Crawlerway.

The transporters work by entering the Vehicle Assembly Building and driving underneath the platform that the rockets sit on, the Mobile Launcher Platform or MLP. Then, the Crawler’s adjustable suspension raises the vehicle’s deck so it makes contact with the MLP and lifts it, before carrying it to the other end of the Crawlerway at a whopping 1mph. When it reaches the launchpad, it docks into a structure with six leg-like pedestals, and lowers its deck until the MLP is fully supported by them. At that point the crawler can drive away, and the rocket is ready for launch.

In square footage, both Hans and Franz’s platforms are around 3 times the size of a basketball court, and the gigantic vehicles are 15 times heavier than the Statue of Liberty! Hans and Franz have been used since their creation in 1965, and they played a crucial role in the 1969 Apollo moon landing. But, the old timers aren’t ready to retire yet, as they’re set to be a key part of the upcoming Artemis program which is aiming to put people back on the Moon for the first time since 1972!

The Feller Buncher

The Feller Buncher, a logging vehicle that can grip a tree with a giant grasping arm, before cutting through it with a built-in saw blade. The vehicle treats trunks like twigs, and once it’s sawn through, its arm can place it in an orderly pile for a log truck to take away later on.

The feller buncher can do the work of a lot of people, but there are other methods for felling trees. Some amateur lumberjacks attempt to rip trees out of the ground by attaching a chain to a vehicle, looping it around the tree-trunk, and using their engine power to pull it down. That method works well for the smaller tree stumps in your back yard, but if you need to wipe out a forest in a pinch and cause widespread deforestation really efficiently, there’s only one vehicle for the job!

Snow-Plow Truck

Let’s move onto something a bit more chilled out. The Øveraasen AS RS600 snow-plow truck, a vehicle that’s specifically designed for clearing airport runways. Its 38ft plow blade and accompanying rear-sweeping system makes it the largest runway sweeper in the world, and its top working speed of 40mph allows it to clear 5,253,000 square feet in an hour. That’s roughly the size of 91 NFL football fields.

The RS600 ensures your flight leaves on time but what if you’re taking the train? Well, snowy tracks are usually cleared with a gigantic wedge-plow that can be fixed to the front of a passenger train to push the snow to the side.

However, they can typically only clear snow up to 13ft deep, so if there’s been a really heavy fall, rail workers will turn to something much larger. This behemoth in the image below, is the Rotary Snow Plow, a 150-ton monster with an 11-foot spinning blade that absolutely glides through thick snow.

The plow’s blade is powered with an engine, and as its gigantic blades churn up the snow, they feed it into a chute that fires it away from the tracks. The driver can control what side the snow is ejected on, in case there’s buildings on the side of the tracks or they happen to travel past their ex’s car.

Those kinds of vehicles have been used since 1869, and although they look terrifying, they’re actually far safer to use than wedge plows. Wedge plows use momentum to clear snow, and in extreme conditions they need to travel at up to 50mph to effectively clear a track. In contrast, the engine-powered Rotary Plows don’t rely on momentum, so they methodically cut through the snow at just 0.5mph.

But despite their slow pace and expensive maintenance costs, in especially snowy places, Rotaries are the only plow that’ll get the job done, like in the Donner Mountain Pass that runs through California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range. In 2017, 14 miles of train track in the mountain pass were covered with over 13ft of snow, and in one weekend, a Rotary managed to clear enough snow from the area to fill 57 Olympic-sized swimming pools!

Chain Trencher

The incredible vehicle below is a chain trencher, and it’s designed for digging wide trenches in soil and soft rock, creating space for underground waterpipes and cables. While the average handheld chainsaw engine has around 3 horsepower's, the biggest chain trenchers use up to 600, as they cut ditches 22ft deep and 6ft wide into the earth.

Still, if you’re digging in a residential area you can’t just carve up the entire street. So you’ll need to dig a narrower trench with a different type of trencher called a rock saw, seen in the image below. That rock and rolling trencher’s narrow blade means that all the vehicle’s power is concentrated into a smaller area, which allows it to cut through tougher materials than a chain trencher, like hard rock, concrete.

Rock saws are often used in urban areas to lay electricity and phone lines and even fiber optic cables that help increase the speed of everyone’s internet connection. That means those vehicles are partially responsible for your wi-fi speed.

Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60

The Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60 is the largest moveable machine in the world, and at 1,640ft long, the mining vehicle is almost 200ft longer than the Empire State Building. The humongous vehicle is tasked with both digging and removing excess soil and rock from coal mines. And it’s one hell of an operation!

The machine uses two massive excavator systems to dig up the earth and rock, before transferring them onto a long conveyor belt built into the vehicle. That conveyor belt carries the waste across the length of the F60’s "bridge", before dumping it onto a designated spot on the other side of the mine. With that method, the vehicle can remove 50,000 tons of earth from a mine per hour, which would be enough to bury an entire soccer field to a depth of 26ft.

Its 13,500 ton body moves at 0.5mph on 760 train-wheels, inching its way forward through the landscape. Once it’s removed the layers of dirt over the coal, and the precious resource is at the surface, other smaller excavators swoop in on the seam to extract that coal. So, while the F60 isn’t setting any speed records, it’s an incredibly impressive vehicle to watch from a distance, as the dust and fumes are terrible for your lungs.

Armored Vehicle-Launched Bridge

Let’s stay on bridges, as we re-enlist in the military and talk about another heavily modified tank. The Armored Vehicle-Launched Bridge, or AVLB, is a type of combat support vehicle that carries a huge folding bridge instead of a gun.

The M60 AVLB is an American version of the vehicle, that’s built on the body of an M60 battle tank. The 60-ton M60 has been used since its debut in 1967 and its bridge can be deployed in 2 minutes. So if your platoon comes upon a deep river, a wide gap, or a pit full of sharks and mines, that vehicle can help your foot soldiers and vehicles cross it incredibly quickly!

An AVLB can typically carry a bridge that’s up to 60ft long and can support up to 60 tons, allowing it to support the weight of most tanks. Once those vehicles have crossed, the AVLB can drive over the bridge itself, before picking it back up and carrying on its way! It’s an impressively fast operation, but those two minutes probably feel like a lifetime when you’re inside the tank, taking on enemy fire!

Belaz 75710 Mining Haul Truck

The biggest dumper on the planet is undoubtedly the Belaz 75710. That behemoth weighs 400-tons unloaded, and the vehicle is a mining haul truck that’s designed to carry excess dirt out of a mine as we dig for precious resources.

Mining just one ton of coal involves digging up around five tons of earth, but luckily, the Belaz can carry a mind-boggling 500 tons out of a mine at a time. For context, that is roughly the same weight as two blue whales. Unsurprisingly, that lifting power doesn’t come cheap. A single Belaz tire costs $90,000, and the vehicle itself will set you back 6 million.

In the US, to avoid destroying the country’s roads, the heaviest that a fully-loaded road-legal truck can be is 80,000lbs, which is 10 times lighter than an empty Belaz. Unlike the Belaz, road-legal trucks are generally used to transport heavy loads over long distances, and when a truck like the Kenworth W900L reaches its destination, it uses hydraulic mechanisms to lift its trailer up and unload its contents.

That is typically used to deliver the truck’s load at the end of a journey, however on a construction site, that hydraulic ability can be used by smaller dump trucks to perform incredibly specific jobs, like reverse drop spreading gravel.

Drop spreading a load of 3" roadbase in reverse. by Keith Palle

That is a method of creating a gravel path, that involves opening the back of the truck’s bed and tipping gravel out while simultaneously driving backwards. That allows a truck driver to create a path on soft terrain without ruining the ground below, as they drive on the path as they create it. That job requires incredible precision with a giant vehicle.

The Big Bud 747

Farming is a big job that requires suitably big vehicles. But the next Big Boy is on another level. The Big Bud 747, a one of a kind tractor that was built in 1977 for a pair of farmers called the Rossi Brothers.

Sometimes, soil that’s around 20 inches underneath the surface becomes too compacted for crops to grow above it, and Deep ripping is a technique that involves dragging long metal tines through a field to loosen that soil. The Rossi Brothers owned a 20,000-acre cotton farm in California, and they wanted a tractor that was powerful enough to carry a giant deep-ripper, that could rip a third of their land every year.

So, they placed a custom-order with the Big Equipment Company, a manufacturer that specializes in building gigantic tractors. The result was the 747, a tractor with 8-foot tall tires and a fully-fueled weight of 100,000lbs, which officially made it the largest farm tractor in the world.

The Big Bud can only move at 8mph, but it was large enough to work on the Rossi’s farm and the vehicle is still used today on a different farm in Big Sandy, Montana. It isn’t only used for deep-ripping though, as it’s also strong enough to pull an 80-foot wide cultivator, which is an attachment that stirs up soil on the surface to get it ready for planting.

In contrast, most of the largest commercially-available cultivators are just 60ft wide, so The Big Bud can use its supersized version to cultivate a field considerably faster than other large tractors. It can cultivate an acre of land in around a minute, and as it carves through a field its weight is spread out between its eight massive tires, so it doesn’t compact the ground below it.

Transporting Telescopes With The Otto And Lore

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array or ALMA is a $1.4 billion observatory in Chile, that uses 66 giant radio telescopes to observe the stars. The array was built in the middle of the 25 million acre Atacama desert, and unsurprisingly transporting the 100 ton telescope antennae to the remote location required an incredibly specialized vehicle.

That insane vehicle is called The Otto and Lore, the custom 140-ton transporters that lug ALMA’s telescopes around the desert. They each have 28 wheels propelled by 1,400 horsepower, and the driving seat is fitted with an oxygen tank so the driver can breathe at ALMA’s altitude of 3 miles above sea level. The vehicles have brains as well as brawn, and they can actually pick the telescopes up themselves with a loading system that precisely mounts and secures the equipment onto their backs.

Then, Otto and Lore will set off into the desert at 8mph, moving the antennas between different pads, depending on what observations the scientists are trying to make. That flexibility allows them to make incredible scientific discoveries, and in 2019, ALMA teamed up with other Arrays around the world to capture the first-ever image of a black hole from 54 million light years away. That image wouldn’t be possible without Otto and Lore’s incredible transporting skills, and their specific job allows us to see truly groundbreaking images of the cosmos.

Faymonville ModulMAX Modular Transporter

We’ve got a beastly, high-tech trailer that can turn itself into a road train! The Faymonville ModulMAX is a self-propelled modular transporter, which can be used as a regular truck trailer or a self-propelled vehicle that’s operated with a remote control. The trailer is propelled with a power pack that has its own built-in engine. That means that each trailer can produce up to 500 horsepower, which allows the gigantic RC car to carry up to 300 tons!

Faymonville - ModulMAX with 450t axle load (4+6 axles, G-Modul w/ V-40 gooseneck) by FAYMONVILLE Trailers to the MAX

You can also link several of the transporters together into a train-like chain to lift even more weight, and according to Faymonville, they can be connected to haul a maximum weight of 5,000 tons while being operated by a single controller. That modular carrying capacity allows them to heft gigantic objects, and in shipyards they’re commonly used to transport entire ships and the engines of giant container ships, which can weigh up to 2,300 tons.

Those beasts only self-propel at around 3mph when fully loaded, so they’re connected to trucks when the load needs to be transported over long distances, allowing for speeds of up to 50mph. However, the fact that the unassuming ModulMAX could single-handedly carry a 2,300 ton ship engine and still have more than half its capacity to spare is incredibly impressive. That is one of the only vehicles in the world that allows you to transport gigantic loads with a remote control.

If you were amazed at these extreme heavy vehicles you might want to read about the most powerful heavy machines in the world. Thanks for reading.