Get Ready To Rumble

In big-kid amusement parks, you get to drive the heavy equipment you spent your childhood dreaming of.

- Josh Dean

Working the controls of an excavator is a little like flying a helicopter in that it requires the use of both hands independently, as well as your feet. I say that having never flown a helicopter, and having been in an excavator for all of five minutes, but it is definitely more like flying a helicopter than driving a car. When do I get to crush something?

These are the thoughts I’m having in the climate-controlled cab of a 26-ton Komatsu PC210LC-10 idling in a north Texas pasture while Jason Nibbe speaks calmly into my headset via two-way radio. Prior to handing me the keys to this bright yellow beast, Nibbe asked me and another client to watch a brief instructional video demonstrating the basics of operating this excavator, as well as the bulldozer and wheel loader that we would be driving later. Nibbe says I am to ignore the two pedals—each of which is paired to one of the machine’s independent steel treads—and focus on my hands.

The joystick on the left controls the “stick” and “swing,” while the one on the right controls the “boom” and “bucket.” None of these are useful terms, of course; I’ve never heard them used in the context of a mechanical arm so powerful that it could, says General Manager David Beardsley, “rip out a road before the cops even knew what you were doing.”

That arm is hydraulically powered and has three parts that you can easily equate to a human limb. The boom is the part from shoulder to elbow, the stick is the forearm, and the bucket is your hand. (Swing refers to how you pivot the cab atop its tanklike treads so you can work in a 360-degree circle around the vehicle without moving the tracks.)