Massive 800 Tonne Komatsu Mining Excavator

[00:00:00]Why is one of the largest hydraulic mining excavators in the world parked in a quiet Swiss town surrounded by houses and green hills instead of hall roads and blasted rock. This is the Kamatsu PC8000 at Aenzella Park in Herizau, Switzerland.

[00:00:20]The park was already known for its indoor activities, but its operators wanted a major outdoor attraction that would continue drawing visitors when the weather was good. Their answer was not another ride or climbing frame. It was an excavator weighing roughly 800 tons.

[00:00:39]The machine now forms the centerpiece of the park's heavy metal garden where visitors can buy a ticket, walk right up to it, and even stand inside its enormous bucket. The PC8000 has been installed as a static exhibit, so it is not here to dig. It stands dry without the enormous quantities of diesel and hydraulic oil required to operate it.

[00:01:05]The park's display guide says permission to run a machine of this scale could not be obtained at this location.

[00:01:13]Even simply parking it required two concrete platforms, each 80 cm thick, supported by 46 concrete piles and 14 tons of reinforcing steel. Seeing the PC8000 in a town rather than a mine is probably the best possible way to understand its size. There are no giant hall trucks or other mining machines beside it to distort the scale. There are just ordinary people, cars and buildings, all of which suddenly look very small.

[00:01:51]The backho configuration.

[00:01:54]This particular PC8000 is in backhoe configuration.

[00:01:59]That means the bucket is mounted in the familiar excavator arrangement and is pulled back towards the machine as it digs.

[00:02:08]Kumatsu also offers the PC8000 as a front shovel where the attachment works upwards and away from the machine.

[00:02:17]In a mine, the backhoe version is particularly useful when the excavator is sitting on a prepared bench and digging material from below its own track level. It offers a maximum digging depth of around 8.6 m compared with just over 3 m for the front shovel configuration.

[00:02:38]A standard PC8000 backhoe has an operating weight of approximately 777 tons, although the figure changes depending on the track pads, wear protection, and bucket fitted.

[00:02:53]The Herasau display uses extra wide tracks and an unusually large bucket, bringing the complete exhibit to around the 800 ton mark.

[00:03:04]From the ground to the raised boom, it stands about 13 m high. It is nearly 25 m long and around 10 m wide, while the operator's eye level is approximately 9 m above the ground. The first component that grabs your attention is the bucket.

[00:03:26]A working PC8000 would normally use a bucket of around 42 cub m designed around material weighing up to approximately 1.8 tons per cub meter.

[00:03:39]The bucket fitted to the Swiss machine is very different. It holds 55 cub m or 55,000 L and was designed for handling relatively light Australian sand.

[00:03:54]By increasing the volume without exceeding the excavator's allowable payload, Kumatsu could create a much larger bucket for lower density material.

[00:04:05]The park describes it as a world recordsized hydraulic excavator bucket.

[00:04:12]The bucket alone weighs around 55 tons when empty and is approximately 5.3 m wide. Its teeth are not decorative either. on a working mine machine. They are replaceable wear parts designed to take the punishment of repeatedly entering abrasive material.

[00:04:33]According to the display guide, one tooth weighs approximately 350 kg.

[00:04:40]That is roughly the weight of a large touring motorcycle hanging from each tooth position. Behind the bucket is the enormous backhoe attachment. The production PC8000-11 uses an 11.5 m boom and a 5.5 m stick.

[00:05:00]At full extension, it can reach a little over 21 m and dig to a depth of around 8.6 m. Its maximum cutting height is approximately 16.6 m, while the machine can dump material at a height of about 10.7 m.

[00:05:20]Breakout force is rated at 2,77 kontons, equivalent to well over 200 tons of force at the bucket.

[00:05:31]Tear out force is approximately 1,813 konton.

[00:05:37]These enormous forces allow the bucket to break into densely packed material and pull a full load towards the machine.

[00:05:47]The attachment also has to survive continuous loading cycles, often for more than 20 hours every day. That is why the boom, stick, pins, cylinders, and mounting points are built on a scale normally associated with industrial structures rather than conventional construction equipment. Moving down to the undercarriage, the scale becomes even harder to process. A standard PC8000 can be supplied with 1.5 meter wide track shoes, but the machine at Herisau uses extra wide 1.9 m shoes.

[00:06:27]Each complete track chain weighs around 60 tons, while a single track link weighs approximately 1.2 tons.

[00:06:37]The tracks stand close to 3 m high. That means the undercarriage alone is nearly as tall as a normal room.

[00:06:47]There are 49 track shoes on each side of a standard PC8000 supported by three upper rollers and eight lower rollers per side. The travel motor and planetary gearbox assemblies on the display machine weigh about 22 tons each.

[00:07:05]Despite all that engineering, this is not a fast machine.

[00:07:11]Maximum travel speed is only around 2.4 km hour, but speed is not the priority.

[00:07:20]These excavators only need to reposition around the working bench. They are not designed to travel any meaningful distance across a mine. And when a major relocation is required, a prepared route and extensive planning may be needed.

[00:07:36]Above the tracks is the car body, slooh ring, and upper structure. The central car body section used during the Swiss build weighs around 55 tons on its own.

[00:07:49]Three hydraulic swing motors rotate the upper structure with a maximum swing speed of approximately 2.7 revolutions per minute.

[00:07:58]That sounds slow until you remember that the system is controlling several hundred tons of machinery together with an attachment and bucket carrying another enormous load. It must accelerate, stop, and reverse that mass through a repetitive loading cycle, potentially thousands of times during a working week. Power comes from two Kamatsu 16cylinder diesel engines. Each has a displacement of roughly 60 L and produces 2,10 horsepower, giving the excavator a combined output of 4,020 horsepower.

[00:08:38]They are turbocharged and after cooled industrial engines designed to deliver steady power under continuous heavy loading rather than simply producing an impressive peak figure.

[00:08:52]Each engine drives four main hydraulic pumps, giving eight pumps in total.

[00:08:58]Every pump can deliver approximately 1,035 L of hydraulic oil per minute with the main circuits operating at pressures of around 310 bar. The complete hydraulic system holds approximately 11,500 L of oil, while the fuel tank holds close to 13,925 L. The engines also require around 860 L of coolant and approximately 580 L of engine oil.

[00:09:34]The Herisau display guide estimates that a working machine could use around 15,000 L of diesel during a 23-hour operating shift. Although actual consumption would depend heavily on the material, loading cycle, operator, and conditions at the mine. The inside of the upper structure is less like the engine bay of a normal excavator and more like a compact industrial plant.

[00:10:03]There are full-sized walkways, stairways, cooling packs, tanks, pumps, filters, and service areas arranged so maintenance teams can move through the machine.

[00:10:16]On the left hand side are the large hydraulic oil coolers which help control the heat produced by moving thousands of lers of oil through the system every minute.

[00:10:28]Three hydraulically powered automatic lubrication systems distribute grease to heavily loaded pins, bearings, and the open slooh gear. Together, the grease containers hold around 900 L. On a machine that may work almost continuously, automatic lubrication is essential.

[00:10:50]Manually greasing every point during every shift would be an enormous task and would require the machine to remain stationary for longer. Then there is the cab. From the outside, it looks almost lost against the size of the upper structure. But on a production PC8000, it is designed as a protected climate controlled workplace.

[00:11:14]The enclosed steel cab is mounted on vibration damping pads and includes air conditioning, a heated full suspension seat, electro-hydraulic joysticks, and an additional trainer seat. The front window is impact resistant and a walkway runs around the cab to provide access for inspections and cleaning.

[00:11:39]Cameras and monitoring systems help the operator see the working area around the machine. This is essential when the bucket, tracks, and counterwe create enormous blind spots.

[00:11:53]Kamatsu's monitoring systems also provide information on the operating condition of the excavator, record faults, and can shut down the engines if a critical problem is detected.

[00:12:06]Operating a machine like this is not simply a matter of moving two joysticks.

[00:12:11]The operator must control bucket filling, lifting, swing speed, and truck positioning while avoiding shock loading and unnecessary movements.

[00:12:22]A smooth operator can improve productivity, reduce fuel consumption, and lower wear across the entire machine.

[00:12:31]In normal service, a PC8000 would spend its life in a large open cast mine, loading blasted rock, ore, coal, overburden, or oil sands material into ultraclass hall trucks.

[00:12:46]Kumatsu matches it with trucks in the 240 to 400 short ton range. Depending on the truck and how fully the bucket is loaded, the excavator can fill one of these hall trucks in approximately 3 to five passes.

[00:13:03]A backhoe machine will normally sit on a prepared bench above the material. The operator digs below track level, fills the bucket, lifts and swings towards the waiting truck, dumps the load, and then returns for the next pass. The cycle may look relatively slow from a distance, but in mining, every second matters.

[00:13:27]Small improvements repeated across thousands of cycles can have a major effect on the number of tons moved, the amount of fuel burned, and the overall cost per ton.

[00:13:40]The excavator is also part of a much larger production system.

[00:13:45]Drilling and blasting teams must prepare the material. Bulldozers maintain the working area and hall roads, and trucks must arrive at the correct intervals.

[00:13:56]If the excavator is waiting for trucks or trucks are queuing for too long, the mine is losing production. For most people, a machine like this would normally be hidden inside a remote mine thousands of miles away and behind strict sight controls.

[00:14:15]That is what makes the PC8000 at Herisau so unusual.

[00:14:20]It takes a piece of engineering built for some of the largest mines on Earth and places it in a Swiss town where anyone can stand beside it, walk into its bucket, and finally appreciate what an 800 ton ultraclass excavator really looks like.