The Largest And Most Stuck Excavator I’ve Ever Recovered

welcome to huntington utah home of a lot of coal mines and one very large and very stuck excavator [Music] this is an absolute doozy of a recovery sit back relax enjoy the show guys now that you've seen the situation you've seen the mess you've seen the logistics of what we're dealing with here before we go any further i want you to drop a comment below and guess how many hours and how many minutes you think this project's going to take us i'm talking like i think we've win 12 hours and 35 minutes 14 hours 37 hours drop in the comments below because we're starting a timer right now and whoever gets the closest the very this price is right okay the closest without going over you my friend are gonna be taking home a giant swag pack we will ship you like a very healthy package of gear so uh drop your guesses below and let's see what happens and wish us luck because this is bad my guess is days does that mean i'm guessing we're out of here by the night [Music] [Music] guys welcome to beautiful huntington utah home of a very large and very stuck excavator uh we just barely rolled up excavators you can see is buried over there uh this is uh this is a cool spot this is about two hours south uh two and a half hours south of where our shop is um we're kind of right here in the heart of central utah kind of near coal mining country and uh we've got a predicament here like i told you uh this uh this old excavator is buried so we just rolled up uh we're going to kind of stage the equipment figure out where we want to park put stuff and uh then uh we'll sit down go over a game plan figure out what we got to do but clown attack number one put on a little wild bill you got yours you like a look like a banker i can't trust you in that hat bank robber all right guys this is the man of the hour right here looks like we're gonna be pretty good friends man i think so based off of what i'm seeing looks like we're a couple of kindred spirits uh she's buried never know when to quilt never know when to go and you don't quit getting started so gonna get unloaded get staged get together make a game plan tell p uh actually we'll probably have i'm bryan fox i started digging a trench and digging out some russian olive and just cleaning up some ditches i got off the road just a little bit and it was all over after that every time you move it just looks like a water bed it sits there and ripples we've hooked a d7 to it the first day and that just pulled it in deeper we had a buddy come over with his machine his excavator and we hooked buckets and it just pulled him into the hole um we decided to let it sit well how happy would he be today if we can get it out of there oh i'll be stoked i got full confidence that dave can get it out of there so here we have mr brian fox and his beautiful family minus one he's probably helping unload the tractor he's fine um brian you guys live nearby yeah we live here live right here and uh just work on your property yep we're clearing some russian olive and got off the road and yeah it was over after that it's deceivingly wet from what i can see yeah there's a lot of water in the ground right here which i'm the only guy in the county that doesn't want water how'd that rain treat you yeah i pumped out thousands of gallons did you really pass a couple weeks you've got a big old excavator over there that's a john deere 450 yep that's like 100 000 pound machine it's 100 000 plus plus uh and it's been stuck for how long at least 12 weeks i thought it was two months but that's closer to what three months you've tried a lot of different things here yeah mostly just try to get something underneath it but every time i do it just sinks out of sight yeah everything i put under just keeps smashing in yeah any predictions how that's going to go down i got confidence in you guys appreciate that you're going to get it out there we go there we go look at that we kind of scheduled two days kind of worst case scenario we got optimistic guys i think we can get it done in one i'm kind of on the fence i think we'll have it out sooner or later tonight yeah here we go [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Music] uh one thing i gotta be super careful of is even though this machine's a lot lighter and it's not gonna sink as easy as that one uh the ground is still very unstable here and since i'm working on this kind of sheer ledge uh one thing that could happen is the pit could want to pull me in this whole thing could slough off and then i'm going to be fighting my way to not get stuck on top of that machine so i got to kind of tow this fine line of getting as close to the edge of the hole as i can without completely burying this machine or sliding off so kind of a delicate balance it's not just group strength right now like i said it's all about strategy it's all about figuring out how close we can get how much material we can remove without endangering another machine or getting that one even more stuck guys here's a fun fact for you i listen to a lot of music i have a very eclectic taste in music literally everything from tech 9 to tchaikovsky mambo number 5 to the moana soundtrack it's all over the place also what i do for work i encounter a lot of loud noises on daily basis between the trucks they have equipment the recoveries it gets loud loud noises for me sometimes a little silence is golden having a good set of noise-canceling headphones is a big deal for me so you guys already know we've been working with cove speaker here on the channel and they have really nice bluetooth audio products these noise canceling headphones they came out with are no different what i love about them is memory foam uh pads right here they're bluetooth obviously they have a built-in microphone so i can take phone calls i can listen to music i can record videos i can talk to you guys uh it also has a little auxiliary port here i can plug my walkie talkie in where you're calling from a walkie talkie they work really well and they fold up super compact best part of all they are affordable right now guys 70 off is what you guys are going to get if you use the link in my description below which makes this set of noise-canceling headphones less than 80 bucks which good luck finding that anywhere else for a good quality set of headphones i use them every day they work for me and i encourage you guys if you need a good set of headphones click the link in my description below because they're probably going to sell out pretty fast at 70 off so enjoy well from past experience i think our best bet right now is to not get that machine stuck we need to keep the sani high and dry as possible um we also need to come in basically cut in a berm right here in front of the boom and build a place where we can get that machine down too to basically get a a nice little ramp built out the problem here is the tracks are locked up this track's completely gone you can see just a couple bumps of it that one is completely buried and that mud gets in there and sets up hard and it just locks that up tight so we're gonna have to get shovels we're gonna have to basically dig all this mud out away put it down build our pad basically a trench dug around the whole thing and then hunter he's going to get on the shovel and just shovel his heart out oh okay me and hunter are gonna get on the shovels that bucket six feet wide like that's insane huge it's twice as big as the machine we had stuck last time all right so one thing we've learned through all of our big recoveries is having something that helps you distribute your weight across the ground such as like a giant swamp mat or a big timber pad like what we have here is literally the difference between getting unstuck and not ultimately these are what helped us get the uh giant excavator off the bed of the great salt lake which was a probably a worse situation than this because access was horrible so we went over and grabbed 16 of these swamp mats these ones are pretty rough shape which is great because we're going to be really really hard on them um trying to pull a stuck machine with these is ultimately putting a lot of leverage a lot of stress a lot of pressure on them we brought enough i think hopefully even extras whatever's left whatever's good we'll take back to the shop with us because it's actually really good hardwood that i reclaim and he actually used in the construction of my house so kind of came full circle there but uh ultimately with these we'll be able to first of all get this machine close enough to dig around that other machine get the track clear and then we can lay these out kind of like a just a little bit of a boardwalk right in front of that big machine and as we start pulling it should pull up on these bam bam up we go so now we stack the mats so basically uh i'm going to build what's going to be the final ramp uh for us to be able to try to pull the big you know hoe up out of there i'm also going to use this map to be able to get down in there and keep digging around the tracks we got that one track pretty well freed up but it's also getting pretty juicy around it again so as we move every time we we hit the ground it pumps water to the surface so we only have very limited moves left we can make before we end up in a situation where it gets swampy again so trying to do as little big moves as possible but a couple more of these small nets to move all we do is big moves all we do is win right make money moves is what they call me in high school that was my name big money moves just credit down in here and be able to clear out both sides of the tracks of this machine uh and then we're going to pull the swamp mats probably back out and reposition them so we actually have a better ramp for the big machine if for some reason they don't want to come out well then this is going to be the ramp so it's a little risky using them right now and not having them exactly the way i want them but realistically i don't know where i need them yet which is why i'm going to put them right here for now that's going to give me the position i need with the sanding to be able next to the machine and then we'll see what happens yeah let's not do that let's not pump any water no more no more water pumping [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] running water but we got one half of one track freed up somewhere under the belly of the beast was a whole pond of water and it started to just pour out from the inside from the tracks and uh yeah we've got a lot of liquid in there hopefully we're not just sitting on more water the more we dig more water is going to come up that'll be bad but we did get that track to move a little bit which is a good feeling um so yeah we'll keep picking away at it hopefully once we get that other track dug out and get a winch hook to this we can start to get it to jug backwards starts to chug backwards i like that little dancer doing that we take that hook off [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] [Music] is [Music] um get up right there and get enough to get underneath these tracks uh [Music] oh [Music] ah [Music] i think what we should do let's uh let's go dozer we're going to try dozer first just try to land yeah do we want it no no let's do this let's get both vehicles like right here we'll just double line it yeah don't even mess around with it little snatch blocks so technically it's four cables running to it i was thinking hook these down to the bottom yep put the snatch blocks on the end of these run both those winches straight to the snatch blocks back to these machines i'm heading back to salt lake okay let me uh on the end update where we're out here that all the whole process went a little bit faster than we anticipated being able to get the tracks cleaned out and get the ramp built in front of it so we've got our swamp mats we've got basically two and a half layers of mats there we got some that are running horizontal like this or vertical and then others that are running horizontally across top of them that provides us a little extra you know strength huh oh man i'm blaming hunter um so that gives us a little bit of extra strength because obviously this machine is super heavy and even when it does come out you're gonna watch it probably just chew those swamp mats to pieces good news is the tracks are so close to moving they want to go we got them pretty cleared out the back end is still really full of dirt and mud and we can't really get back there with this any other machine because it's really swampy on that far side um luckily the ground has had a chance to dry out since the last storm a little bit so that's been really nice um we almost got this is the part where we can screw up the whole recovery because we get impatient you know who you're talking to i'm talking to the juice box guy start pushing things and then we start you know we're not gonna do that what we're gonna do we're gonna get the dozer we're gonna get our five ton we're gonna rig them up right here we're gonna run the winch lines to this point on the track hoe then we're gonna run our snatch blocks um on the middle so it's basically doubling the winch power of each vehicle so the five ton and the dozer will both have extra winching power um twice the winching power of what a normal one straight line would do and the reason we're doing that is because we may only have one shot pulling this thing out and we need all the pulling power we can get once we get the machine up on this mat here we're in good shape [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah we're having a tail light there oh that was like when we bought it yeah all right backed up into the woods no that was that was like we bought it man man nothing nothing happened seeing some fresh shears on these screws here both screws nope nope nope uh the plan right now is i'm going to jump in the big hole that stuck we'll have brian here and his dozer running his winch we're going to have jack jim run the winch on the five ton and uh we're gonna clear the area because one of these cables breaks it's a bad time for everybody so that's the biggest risk that we run right now is breaking cables because that sucks but this whole place sucks [Music] so ah [Music] it's a lot of dead weight the tracks are this close to spinning the problem that we're having now is the five ton that we're anchoring uh the front of it to the trackhoe i think jim just pulled the front bumper off of the five ton so that means it's a lot of freaking weight so we gotta figure out a better anchor system right but then it would be pulling off the tractor so we can go to the truck yeah [Music] right um so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] right so [Music] [Music] so hey [Music] [Applause] wow [Music] oh [Music] that's not even tomorrow yet i don't know i'm dinner time man ecstatic that thing's buried let's look at that hole real quick because that's [Music] [Music] oh you want some swamp mats because they're yours oh thank goodness oh yes i'm so glad you said that i'd pull oh man's boat dock i might need to hang on to him oh you guys are freaking awesome this is amazing i can't believe you answered my call yeah man it worked out great thank you i'm glad you called this is like the stuff we dream about i don't know if you even saw this did you see this bumper it was when did that happen the same time i asked you about that tail light oh no wait oh this bump yeah no no this was like this when we bought it if this wasn't this wasn't us i was the sun was hitting we were in the shade it's shadows and stuff but you know that's how they come factory that way oh yeah that bumper factory tail light factory it's weird they come cracked but i i don't know how the military did things back in the day but a little backwards than i do it now yeah it's a factory it's the whole thing rust factory rust [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: HeavyDSparks

Views: 4,001,410

Rating: 4.8455782 out of 5

Keywords: Recovery, Diesel, Diesel brothers, Heavy equipment, Cat, Caterpillar, Whistlindiesel, Cleetus McFarland, Demolition ranch, Letsdig18, Matt’s Offroad, Yankum, Mud, Adventure, For you, Heavydsparks, Sparks motors, Freedom bus, Dirt, Dirt work, Tractor, Machine, Dave sparks, Diesel Dave, Dieseldave

Id: lQ3o6CzP-2Q

Length: 31min 20sec (1880 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 08 2021