Saturday, January 28, 2012

Big Benny

Today, we went to visit Big Benny. Who is Big Benny, you ask?  Let me show you:

Big Benny is the largest land-based crane in the world and has been working on the new Intel factory for the last couple of months. It's huge--pretty much everywhere you drive these days, if you are looking in the direction of Intel, you see Big Benny.  Here are a few facts about our friend: His maximum lifting capacity is 4000 tons. He has a 10 million pound counter weight. The main hook block weighs 116 tons. Fuel consumption under full operation is 100 gallons/hour. His birthday is March 20th and he'll turn one this year. Big Benny is also expensive: it's rumored to cost $100,000/day for rental.

For Intel Family Day, we were able to go visit. It's pretty impressive to see up close! The kids all got yellow construction hats (really quite flimsy--I'm sure they don't meet current safety criteria) and lots of stickers to put on them. They also took our photo with him.

The family with Big Benny


Sarah holding a sample of the 2-inch wire that controls the crane. There are over 5.2 miles of it and it weighs 25 lbs/ft.

There were also had a lot of other construction trucks around that we could look at.

Pretty cool!

1 comment:

  1. Wow! That's one powerful crane! Glad it's working for us!

    ReplyDelete