Customer Reviews

Extreme Mining Machines: Stripping Shovels and Walking Draglines

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I enjoyed this book. It has a wealth of background information and contains good diagrams (such as how a walking dragline propels itself) that are not easy to find. Well-researched and well written in a style that is easy to follow and understand. The tables in the back are complete and helpful to anyone researching shovels & draglines. The photographs are great (and many in color, a nice feature), and illustrate the differences between the machines. The details of mining operations and company histories are much better than I would have expected in a 120-page book, considering the scope of the subject. I would recommend this book to anyone with even the slightest interest in mining. A layperson will be able to skip a sentence or two and still add a great deal to their knowledge base. People in fields associated with mining will also learn something, and enjoyably.

I read this good book, here in Brazil. The subject of this book are the biggest shovels and walking draglines ever built. In fact this book has two parts. First part is about shoves and the second about draglines.
Some advantages of this book:
1-This book uses cover and paper with great quality.
2-This book has many photos and some drawings. About 70% of its space are photos.
3-The human-made dinosaurs "Capitain" super shovel and the "Big muskie" dragline both are covered, as also the destiny of these human-made dinosaurs, being scraped after decades of continuos and successfull use, in mining operations.
4-This book would became bigger and better, if it had a third chapter about biggests continous excavators, such as that made in Germany. The are so big as Capitain and Big muskie, but they remain being used today.
I must also remember, some problems with this book:
1-This book uses measures, such as feet, inches and cubic yards instead of metric system. I'm a Brazilian and I prefer cubic meters, instead of cubic yards.
2-About machines made in former Soviet Union by UZTM and NKMZ, this book is weak. Yes, to build shovels and draglines is mainly an American business, but Russian also did many good things.