The Silver Spade - Picking Rocks Off The Highwall - Closeup

Mining shovels and draglines have always needed to handle rocks too big for the bucket. There are movies showing the Bucyrus railroad steam shovels doing this while building the Panama Canal.

The Silver Spade did this on a much larger scale. The first cubic rock is the size of a good size garage, the thick slab is a small house.

The video shows the precision that the machine and its operators were capable of.

This was shot from Cadiz-Flushing Road, "the dirt road" , just south of 519.

First closeup at 4:50.
First rock at 6:50.
Slab at approx 14:15, but prep work before that.

The original video format is 720 x 480. The video will look crisp at that viewing size.

This video was shot with a Sony Handycam in Digital 8. This format used 2 hour Hi-8 analog videotapes, running at 2x speed, to produce high quality 1 hour digital video. It was a revolutionary format at the time, and was used extensively by news media for field news gathering, such as in Iraq. A bit of image quality is lost in the MS moviemaker editor, losing some of the striking immediacy of the format. Note that it is interlaced, and sized for broadcast televisions of the time.

This is from a large box full of 75(!) of these 1 hour tapes, that WurliTzer153Duplex is gradually converting via FireWire. These were shot by both of us, with several cameras, and it's interesting to figure out who did what.

A large percentage of the 75 videotapes are labeled as Silver Spade...!

There is some cool stuff in there.

#594
May 20, 2001
Sony Handycam Digital 8
20010520d Spade Rocks