The MAMMOTH has fallen...
Yesterday saw the toppling of the S800 bucketwheel's bridge. Scrap contarctor SA Metal began the demolition of the now defunct stripping machine that served CDM and later Namdeb for many years removing millions of tons of sandy overburden to expose the diamond bearing gravels below.
As akward and topheavy as this monster appeared, it took some serious cutting and tugging to get the structure to the ground.
Have pictures on the camera at work, will post these tomorrow.
Gee Andrew wernt you suppose to fall with it? image19 image031 swink
Piece by piece the giant is torn down and taken apart to be sold for scrap.
Here are the first of the pics.
More...
Nice Pics Andrew, need to pass these onto Charly Blakemore I'm sure it would bring a tear to he's eyes.
bye1 bye1 :emot19_2:
Thanks for the snaps Andy, indeed a historical moment....
Will try and keep up to date with the pics as they cut it up.
image031
As a boilermaker its sad to see these icons bite the dust.................................I don't think this one was born while I was there......................................... image04
Yes, very sad.
@ Frank Must've been about 75 or 76.
Thanks George!........... we left Oranjemund back end of 71 there were some great artisans worked in the fitting and boiler shop I can see most of their faces but not their names, and I think sadly a lot of the skills they had in them days have been taken over by machines today, I suppose that's progress for you.
I went scratching through my stuff, found these photos of the monster - it was an OPS school tour into the mine. Agree with Georg, must have been around '76 when I took the photo's as a 10-year-old. The size of it was mind-boggling!
woo_hoo
I spend lots of hours working on the S800 and S400-Pity
Quote from: Bertie Horak on May 28, 2010, 09:29:24 AM
I went scratching through my stuff, found these photos of the monster - it was an OPS school tour into the mine. Agree with Georg, must have been around '76 when I took the photo's as a 10-year-old. The size of it was mind-boggling!
woo_hoo
HI Bertie the photo's you have posted was the first bridge designed for the S400 Wheel, the photo's Andrew posted are of the upgraded Bridge to convey overburden for the S800 Wheel and spreader, they should of chromed the wheel and put it at the entrance to town like they've done at Kathu
When they have removed the complete structure there's going to be a big hole at 50G area where it was parked for many years.
bye1 bye1
2 weeks later (and a breal in operations) and this is what's left of the monster. These guys don't take shots from steelwork...
Pic 012 = What's left of the bridge, just the end at the spreader.
pic 013 = The team of machines that are doing the demolishing.
The yellow machines left to right: Left is a mechanical shear that cuts steel sections into small pieces about 1 meter in length. similar machines have been in Discovery Channel's Extreme Machines
Centre is a mechanical grab that picks up the pieces and loads them into the long white semi-trailer for despatch to a collection point.
Right is a tyre loader (front-end loader) that loads the smaller pieces gathered by hand and loads them onto heaps or onto the truck.
Far right next to the loader, manual labour for all kinds of peripheral tasks and the gas cutting of the bigger sections that the shears cannot get it's jaws around, as can be seen in pic 010 where the structure of the spreader is being cut up with gas torches.
Thanks Andy, Sad stuff indeed....
Looks like a dead REptile... :-(
Thanks Andrew for the pics. I was involved with the bucket wheel from the beginning and spent many hours working on the monster and call outs. I remember I made a lot of money with overtime in the beginning as there were a lot of problems in the beginning until we managed to get the monster operating well. Clive Symes will remember that too well as well.
What's happened to the days when anything metal wasn't allowed off the mine site?
The mine was obliged to clean up the desert after years of mining, they also realised that they had 100's millions of rands lying around rusting...... Heard the contract for the scrap was worth about 400 million, cannot confirm that though!