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Digging deep into construction machinery news

Chinese “Beast of Burden” at Rest

Fri 21 Jun 2019

Chinese “Beast of Burden” at Rest

Gary came across this elderly cable shovel during a field trip but was not able to identify the machine. Having done some detective work myself, I have discovered that this is likely to be a product manufactured by the Tiayuan Heavy Machinery (Group) Co Ltd, whose manufacturing plant was first established in Taiyuan in the north west province of Shanxi as far back as 1950. It is documented that by the end of the 1990’s the factory had produced in excess of 700 units of cable excavators for use in quarrying and surface mining operations. I think this machine is the WK-4A model which was available later as the upgraded 4B model both of which competed in the 200-tonne class sector. Like a lot of Chinese produced kit, this machine would probably have been copied from other manufacturers, possibly based on old Soviet designs. Face shovel bucket capacities for these models were 4m3 and 5m3 respectively. Brutally crude by today’s standards, but in its day, this would have been seen as some machine. The company later went on to produce some P&H electric mining shovels under licence for the Chinese market. In the 1990’s some Demag hydraulic excavators were built in the factory namely the H55, H85 and H121 models. The Digger Man Blog would like to thank Gary Major for sharing this latest batch of photos with us.  

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