Man Digs Out Basement Using Radio Controlled Toy Tractors 169
Phurge pointed out a story about a man with a fleet of remote control toys and a lot of patience. "Excavating a basement using professional machinery is nothing new but doing it with radio controlled (RC) scaled models is something unheard of. Welcome to the little big world of Joe, from Saskatchewan, Canada. For the past 7 years, Joe has been digging out his basement at an average annual rate of 8 to 9 cubic feet using nothing more than RC tractors and trucks. And we're talking about the whole nine yards here — he starts by transporting the excavator on an RC truck to the basement, unloads it, digs and uses other trucks to transfer the dirt up to the ground through a spiral ramp! He even has a miniature rock crusher! 'I feel quite fortunate to have stumbled onto this basement excavation idea, it's been a great past time to date dreaming up new ideas to tackle different projects along the way,' Joe wrote on the Scale4x4rc forums where he also posted pictures and videos of his feat."
Re:How about oing the same for snow clearing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Math seems wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Average rate of 9 cubic feet per year X 7 years = 63 cubic feet.
That's a cube of dirt 4' x 4' x 4'.
Hardly sounds like 'excavating a basement'.
I'm guessing that the 9 cubic feet number is wrong. Maybe 9 square feet (with an undisclosed height of about 8'-10') for an annual average of 72-90 cubic feet and a final excavation of a room about 8' x 8'?
For the REAL Geek Award.... (Score:5, Interesting)
... this man should have been a bit more geeky and lazy at the same time by putting the camera and the RC controls on the Internet, then having remote volunteers run the RC toys to dig out his basement.
This gets me thinking I can probably get the internet to excavate and build me a large swimming pool, given about 50 RC bulldozers and a month of use of my web-server.
Down to earth applications, hazardous zones (Score:5, Interesting)
My second thought was that this guy will be fist in line to operate remote manipulators on the moon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator [wikipedia.org]
My third thought was that we could have used this guy and some bigger RCs at Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Re:Hyphens (Score:4, Interesting)
I've reread the title four times, and I can't figure out a single way to parse the sentence in a grammatically-correct fashion other than the one way that was intended -- especially since the only place I can think of where a hyphen would apply would be in "radio-controlled."
So how did you misread it, out of curiosity?