September, 2018
Toy trucks!!
Look at these toy trucks! I had to bend WAY down to get these photos from this angle. An afternoon walk into the small town of Logan Lake brought me to a City Park with these toy trucks … what fun!
Ok, you’ve probably figured out by now that these machines are not toys, but are the real deal … and BIG deals at that. They are huge!
The tires alone are more than 11 feet in diameter (that means they are more than 11 feet tall, think about that). The photo below is a photo of me standing next to the tires on the “dump truck”. This is no toy machine!
I could have walked into the mouth of that loader on the left in the photo above. Heck fire, I probably could have set up a small apartment and then just lived in there.
Interesting information on the sign above. Although these tires are huge, the air pressure is only 100 psi (the air pressure in each of my travel trailer tires is 65 psi). The weight of one of these truck tires (just the tire, not the metal wheel that the tire mounts on) is about 7 TONS … the weight of the metal wheel AND the tire is about 10 TONS. There are close to 16 MILES of reinforcing wire in each tire (hence the weight, I would presume). Retail price of one tire back in the 1980’s was approximately $46,200.00 each, although the company here that purchased them (more about that below) got them at a discount … a mere $24,420.00 each. There were only three manufacturers of replacement tires of this nature in the world … Bridgestone (Japan), Goodyear (Kansas, USA), and Michelin (Spain). This particular dump truck had 8 Goodyear tires on the back axles and 2 Michelin tires on the front wheels. So 10 tires … at $24,420 each … a full set of replacement tires cost the company $240,420.00, not including tax, shipping, the cost to install the tires, etc.
The sign above was in front of what I called the “dump truck”, but what they called a “haulage truck” or a “haulpack”. This truck was 20 feet high, 24 feet wide (it would block three lanes of traffic on most highways), 54 feet long, with a gross weight of 422 TONS.
The Highland Valley Copper mine (who donated this equipment to the town of Logan Lake) is the largest open pit copper mine in Canada, and it’s one of the largest open pit mines of any kind in the world. This open pit mine is located just west of Logan Lake. It’s so large that it can be seen from outer space. On my way out of Logan Lake at the very end of my visit here and on my way home, I drove by the mine on the main highway and practically drove off the road when I realized how big it is. It’s about 16 miles long and 4 miles wide. It is freaking huge!!
From this mine, still today, copper and molybdenum, with trace elements of silver and gold, are removed from the earth and are trucked to Vancouver, BC, where they are shipped overseas, mostly to Japan and China, for processing and production of steel. Good things come from this mine, of course … like loads and loads of copper. But bad things come from this mine (and this sort of mining) as well. I’ll leave that discussion for another day.
The two pieces of heavy equipment in the photos above were used in the mine and were replaced with newer and bigger equipment in 1990. It’s amazing stuff.
Later that afternoon I returned to the Logan Lake Municipal Campground, to my wee little travel trailer with it’s 27″ diameter tires weighing in at about 39 pounds each. I think my rig is just right, don’t you? 🙂
