Caterpillar 777 Mining Haul Truck Transported by 11 Axle Lowboy

It's an old six speeder built 379. It's set up with a 550 cat, 18 speed, and four 11 rears, and today we're set up on 11 axles. Beam trailer. Moved this triple seven cat dump truck. The weight of it is roughly 200,000 pounds gross. There the way it sits is 16.7 height. By removing the tires in the front, it would let us drop the height about two and a half feet. When you first load it, you block it to a certain height in order to be able to remove the tires. Once the tires were removed, we changed the blocking to lower the height. This particular machine is tied down. It's got 10 points on it. They're all high tensile half inch chains. Over bridges, they like to span the weight, and rather than have the concentrated weight like on five axles in a group like you would have in the back of this trailer, by spreading it out and putting a stinger on, you're dividing your weight either on a road or on a bridge, spreading it apart. So it's not all concentrated on one area, and that's the reason for the Jeep in the front also, is to spread where your weight is distributed on a bridge. The overall length is the same thing. You have a bridge beam that's say even 100 foot long. The longer you are, the less amount of weight that you have in the center of that beam. That's what gives us the opportunity to get a little bit more weight is by spreading the weight around axle-wise and length-wise. The front pilot car in this case has got a height pole, which will go ahead and check all the wires and any obstructions for overhead. And then the rear escort will help around the corners, and they'll stop traffic. And today's move will also have police escorts. They'll decide whether they want to stop traffic and let you roll through, or whether, you know, it's a dangerous intersection, and we'll have to wait for the lights. Right lane, Mike. Right two lanes. That's going to be the low wire. Easy does it, easy does it. Yeah, we may have to work. Yep, if you stay on this side here, buddy, you should be able to make it without a problem. Play room, play room. He's coming around on your left. Yeah, let's get a little speed. All right, stay to the right. Stay to the right, we hit that one. The bigger problem that you have is the lean of the road. The lean of the curve, or some of the road machines, as tall as they are, it changes the lean of it. That's usually a concern. Kind of work with the crown of the road. If it's a curve, you want to try to pick up a little speed, if at all possible. Pretty much like, you know, on the race track. You've got the lean, and you've got the speed that keeps the cars in place. If you can get a little bit of speed to kind of match the curve, it helps stabilize the machine from shifting. So you kind of got to play that as best as you can to your favor. All these dump trucks obviously are good size loads. Some of the larger excavators that we move for contractors. Most of our work is mostly construction equipment for dealers and contractors. Some of the places that we have to take this equipment. Trying to figure a way in and out of a lot of places is usually the hard part of it. And a lot of the planning goes along with that. Going on 26 years. We started in the mid-80s, but with the change in the laws, people were kind of leery about spending the kind of money that it takes to put something like this together. And especially if they only have three or four moves a year, because they only own one or two machines that require this kind of setup. We do all of the, pretty much all the southeast. Most of our contractors mainly work Florida. Some of them will get a job here and there outside of state, which we help with. We go to the plants, we go to the ports, pick up machines that come in from overseas for the dealers. We've had contractors that have gone as far as Michigan and Texas. They're one of our customers. We go wherever they need their equipment moved to. Well, initially I started with a construction company up north, out of Philadelphia. And the first eight years, I did New York City down through Richmond. When things slowed up in the 70s, I relocated to Florida and been moving out of Florida since. I started on heavy equipment and that's all I've ever been away from equipment.