Posted on 02/14/2012 10:20:10 AM PST by trailhkr1
A Canadian guy named Joe has been digging out the basement of his house using nothing but radio-controlled scale model construction equipment... since 1997. Yes, you read that right — he's been digging out his basement for 15 years — with nothing but little R/C tractors, diggers and even a miniature rock crusher! Amazing.
At an average rate of eight or nine cubic feet of earth moved each year, the process has been absolutely glacial. But what do you expect when every morning he drives his little excavator on its transport truck down to the basement, unloads it, and then uses it to dig out the basement walls.
Then Joe uses the excavators to load R/C trucks and they work their way up a spiral ramp to the basement window where the soil gets dumped outside.
(Excerpt) Read more at jalopnik.com ...
Jalopnik Pingnik
He’s divorced isn’t he?
lol.
BFD ... a not terribly practical hobby is a whole lot better than drunken TV watching.
I would advise not to over-think it.
This is not a practical way to dig a basement. Nobody suggested it was, did they?
It's a hobby. It's fun. At least, he's enjoying it. I suggest that if he's not harming anybody, or neglecting his duties as husband (?) and father (?), then it's great.
It's certainly not insane.
♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ And there's Uncle Joe
He's a-movin' kinda slow
at the Junction ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬
The problem is with the little tiny union organizers that would show up with little tiny lawyers driving Hot Wheels BMW's
What does something like that pay?
I bet he’ll find Jim Hoffa down there!
ROFLMAO!
I was just thinking “autonomous” myself. There’s a lot of little RC vehicles there. If he’s manually operating every single one without any buddies helping him, no wonder its taking so long. If someone could help him out with some robotics hardware/software to make them all run simultaneously, he’d be done in a month.
He is playing. I’d rather play another way, but it is good to play. Adults get too serious.
*Snort*
...and one of them will be holding a bill for the Pepsi soaked keyboard that post cost me.
I laughed til I hurt.
I’m wondering how much maintenance/replacement he had to do with the RC vehicles, especially the diggers? I mean, they work (obviously), but I would imagine the motors aren’t built with the idea that they will be used full-time as actual work vehicles.
Still, pretty interesting stuff. I’d never have the patience for it - I was one of those kids who like the “snap-together” model cars and the like. Didn’t have the patience to glue everything, much less take on one of those advanced model kits where you actually trimmed/carved the various pieces from balsa wood!
Neat idea, although a little bit OCD for me. ;)
If I was still playing with scale model machinery, I think I'd make a Scalextric version of Steve McQueen's 1971 movie Le Mans, instead. But to each his own.
;^)
then you probably don"t want to know about the tiny hippies dental flossing themselves to the RC D8s
There was a guy who acted crazy all the time, who started digging in front of his house by using a little army folding shovel every summer when I was 8 years old. When I came home from college 20 years later, and went by his house, he was still digging and had dug up 500 foot square and 30 feet deep hole.
When I returned 30 years later the hole had been covered in, coz evidently the house had been sold and the guy moved. Everyone called him a a nutcase.
Then one day I was talking with a state geologist who told me that the glacier had crossed the area 3 times, advancing and retreating, and dumping 3 moraines, each one 10 to 30 feet deep. He said that the state geology dept. was trying to find the edge of these moraines at a certain latitude and a belt of longitude because that is where the glacier had dumped Canadian gold it had scraped and transported hundreds of miles. I doubled checked the map later and drove along the latitude to the coordinates of the glacial dump. Guess what, the center of the lat and long. coordinated belt was the front of the crazy guy`s house.
A true story.
PS the geologist said they had looked everywhere using GPR`s
in the narrow area where the dump should have been but found nothing. They couldn`t understand it coz they said this was the only area that it could have been coz they looked everywhere else.
So I guess you never did anything like this.
It would be a great project for a group of engineering students to design an automated digging system with vehicles like these. Then it would be fun to do time lapse photography of the action as a hole is dug 24/7.
All you have to do is just monitor it and replace vehicles that break down or get stuck.
He needs a model train to go with that. Eccavate and load on train cars, up and out the window.
Gee, wonder why there’s no mention of a wife or girlfriend?
Wow! That pen is hugh.
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