As I have said many times before, it is easy to lose faith in the human race on a day to day basis but when you’re able to get past the top layer of badness, we’re still doing some incredible things. Things like shooting robots to planets and learning that the conditions may exist to support life there and creating machines like the one below that is so fantastically complicated and simple at the same time it is mind boggling to consider. What do we mean? Read on.
The video you are about to watch was made in Holland and it features a couple of guys from a company called Van Damme Drainage. They are using an Inter-Drain GP-Series V-Plow trenchless pipe layer and it is freaking amazing. At first we thought it was a modified excavator but after looking at it more and more it seems like the thing is scratch built to do the job that it is doing here.
As you will see, the two man crew start at the end of the drainage ditch where one guy operates the tractor and the other guy threads some of the drainage hose into the fixture at the bottom of the V-plow/cutter that is the most genius part of the whole program. The depth is set and the tractor drives forward pulling the V-plow into the Earth while it simultaneously lays the pipe under the ground. The big spools on the side of the tractor feed the pipe into the plow and the machine just chugs along laying it down as fast as the driver wants to push it. It lifts the Earth, lays the pipe and sets it back down again in an amazingly clean process. One of the things we really dug about the whole operation was how polished the sides of the V-plow are from being pulled through the ground during previous jobs.
The thought and engineering that went into building this rig really are amazing to consider and the fact it is able to do the job so well is a testament to the people behind its development. 500hp plus some awesome looking hydraulics, the metal cleated tracks, and a mondo steel roller on the back is BangShifty perfection!
