This definitely isn’t the first incredibly detailed Lego crane we’ve ever featured, but Dawid Szmandra’s 1:24-scale Liebherr LR 11000 literally towers over previous creations. With the boom fully raised, the model stands just over 24 feet tall, and weighs in at a hefty 60 pounds. But most impressive is the fact that…
Do you remember how proud you were the first time you built something with Lego—without instructions—that other people could recognize? We’re sorry to say it was probably complete garbage compared to ShineYu’s fully-functional, remote-controlled Liebherr LTM 1350 all-terrain crane model.
Bad idea: trying to use a crane to lift a water tank before checking if it’s empty or not. You can see the crane’s arm begin to buckle under the weight of the tank and then watch it totally collapse as it drops the tank onto the side of the building and flips itself off the ground.
Most people see a tower crane and wonder what it’s building. These guys see a construction crane and think the logical thing to do is to to climb it all the way up, walk all the way across, and then just hang out there while literally hanging off the crane. The crane basically becomes a playground to them. The monkey…
It might seem like remote control cars are where all the real fun’s at, but it’s hard not to be completely wowed by this flawless miniature recreation of a Felbermayr heavy-lifting crane that itself is capable of hoisting over 80 pounds of cargo.
For anyone who needs money and also has access to a crane and can somehow finagle an entire ATM machine out of thin air, you now have your blueprint into breaking an ATM open. Those machines are tough! Breaking ATMs for cash is the stuff of movies and TV shows! But it doesn’t have to be hard. Just drop it from a 100…
This footage from a few years back shows a bridge in Bedfordshire, England getting demolished in less than 15 hours. Basically, a night’s work was all it took to vaporize a steel and concrete structure. It’s really neat to see the progression and to see all the machines working in tandem. It’s also just really damn…
A construction crane builds buildings and structures and basically everything but what builds a construction crane? Another construction crane? Nope, a construction crane builds itself. Here’s a fun video recently re-dugg up by Digg showing how one of them tower cranes are built.
This is my favorite thing. A few years ago Liebherr showed off the power and strength of its giant mobile cranes by lifting each other. That is the small crane (which is pretty damn big already) gets lifted by a bigger crane which gets lifted by an even bigger crane which gets lifted by the biggest crane (which is…
A small group of elephants who had been displaced have been butting heads with local villagers in a village in Daloa in the Ivorty Coast. The elephants have damaged crops, ruined homes, injured people and so forth. The villagers wanted to kill the elephants. Luckily for everyone though, the International Fund for…
What’s better then a monster machine? A meta machine. Here are a bunch of machines that really took the advice “Just do you!” to heart.
Bertha, the world’s largest tunneling machine, has been stuck under downtown Seattle since it broke in December 2013. Engineers have had to concoct a massive and expensive rescue plan—essentially a whole construction project in itself. And yesterday, the Bertha’s broken cutter head was finally hoisted out of the…
Need a pick-me-up this morning? Know that, somewhere in the world, there are origami cranes capable of performing synchronized dance numbers across an electromagnetic stage, and that life is kind of amazing.
At 328 feet, the crane stands taller than the Statue of Liberty, plus has a lifting capacity of nearly 2000 tons. But what makes The Left Coast Lifter extra spectacular is that it operates by floating on a 384-foot barge powered by 3 diesel generators.
The US Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for keeping debris out of New York's Harbor, whether it's dead whales, helicopters, driftwood, or floating docks. Without the Corps the harbor and the outlying beaches of the Rockaways and the Jersey Shore would be filled with massive pieces of debris and ships would risk…
There are 42 tower cranes working together to build a brand new city district for more than 20,000 people in Vienna, Austria. It's the biggest construction site in Europe right now. But it's not always work work work for the cranes, they get to dance in a fun light show on their off day. Watch them get down and light…
Many of today's seafaring megastructures would be nigh on impossible to build without the lifting assistance provided by dockside cranes. And as we continue to build ever-bigger systems we'll need ever bigger cranes, like the gigantic hammerhead from Kone.
Ships today—even the massive likes of the Emma Maersk and Marco Polo—just aren't big enough to handle the demands of globalized trade. So to quickly and safely build the next generation of super-sized LNG tankers and container vessels, China's Dalian shipyard relies on GE's staggeringly-huge, laser-guided Goliath…
Aircraft carriers are, how to say, big. Building them is a lot easier if you have a really, really big crane. Meet Big Blue. She's the largest crane in the western hemisphere, and she's hard at work piecing together the new Ford-class aircraft carriers in Newport News, Virginia.
Like something out of a twisted Disney nightmare, President of Russia Vladmir Putin took to the skies, clothed in white overalls and a faux beak, and rigged into a strange flying contraption, in a fantastic effort to teach darling baby birdies—cranes, to be precise—how to fly.
