“A small, mobile city with a giant buzz-saw attached to the front end.”

Although my series on 60s technology probably shouldn’t include a machine built in 1995, but Bagger 293 has a string of siblings going back to 1958. And it truly is a super machine. It is the world’s largest bucket wheel excavator.

Bagger 293 is 96 metres (314.9 feet) tall (Guinness World Record for highest terrestrial vehicle, shared with Bagger 288). It is 225 metres (738.2 feet) long (same as Bagger 287), weighs 14,200 tonnes (31.3 million pounds), and requires five people to operate. It is powered by an external power source providing 16.56 megawatts. The bucket-wheel itself is over 21.3 metres (69.9 feet) in diameter with 18 buckets, each of which can hold over 15 cubic metres (529.7 cubic feet) of material.

It can move 240,000 m³ (8,500,000 cu ft)[3] or[clarification needed] 218,880 tonnes of soil per day (the same as Bagger 288).

Here is an excerpt from a longer documentary on Bagger 293.

And because you find strange things when researching via the internet, there is a video about Bagger 288 (a slightly smaller bucket wheel excavator) that either makes me laugh, or confuses me, depending on when I watch it. There are a lot of videos about Bagger 288, because it was constructed in 1978, so it has been at work for a while. It was the largest land vehicle when it was completed, surpassing Big Muskie. It in turn was surpassed by Bagger 293