Yesterday I was on a guided tour in Aitik, an open-pit mine about 60 km above the artic circle. This mine is a 3km x 1,5km and 400 meters deep hole in the mountain and is owned by Boliden mine company. They are supposed to expand its width one or two kilometers and going down to 800 meters. Today they're producing 18 million ton ore per year, mostly copper, but in 3 years their production is planned to expand to 32 million ton per year.
Some of the machines they have:
One of the worlds largest wheel loaders, Caterpillar 994.
The 2 million € Cat 793 trucks which are over 6m tall, 13m long and weighs 145 ton -closer to 500 with its payload.
They have 16 cylinders engines at 2200 hp and are normally consuming around 400 liters of diesel fuel per hour and their payload was about 350 tonnes of oar. I think I saw at least 15 of these trucks when we were there.
The only demands for driving one of them is that you must have had an ordinary car driving licens for at least 3 years plus one week practical driver education made by the mine company. There were mostly young female drivers and there is infact a productive reason for that. The mine company had tested it out that women can drive with the lowest fuel consumtion and they causes the lowest number of breakdowns. Women can also handle that particular kind of stress better. With stress it means to have those machines running 24/24, 7/7, 365/365. The trucks are far too expensive to ever let them stand still other then when they need some maintenance work. Even at lunch breaks a new driver have to step in to continue the driving. Coffee breakes were usually made in the trucks. For the reason that they always have to be running they have three times more drivers than trucks so the workers can have reasonable working schedules.
The P&H 4100 electrical shovel was driven by an electrical cable with 6600 volt of power.
The machine weight is over 1200 ton and it is loading about 100 ton in every shovel
wich itself -emty- weight 70 ton. The operator is sitting about 11 meters from the ground
and with its wire masthead it was approx 19 meters high, 14m long and 12m wide.
It was like watching a three store high "building" or a very large house moving around.
The price to get one in your own garden is somewhere around 11,4 million €.
The whole machine had to move real carefully back and forth because it "swung" quite easely on its track shoes (wich also could break because of the high pressure) and at the same time it has to roll in or out the electrical cable. A wheel loader came by and drove up closer to the electrical shovel while we were watching it. It was the largest Caterpillar wheel loader that's allowed on an ordinary highway. But still, with its cabin at the same level as this monster of excavators rear bumper it looked allmost like a toy.
Overall a fun experience to have seen this place irl...it almost felt like entering a new world where you're not much bigger than a little mouse compared with all these huge machines.
(I'm not in any of these pics. They are just examples of the same things from the net.
)
When the missions are completed, I will need to complete all those small stupid jobs to get a 100% finished game.
