Man Has Spent 15+ Years Excavating Basement With Radio Controlled Trucks

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Man Has Spent 15+ Years Excavating Basement With Radio Controlled Trucks

I'm at a loss for words here.

Welcome to the little big world of Joe, from Saskatchewan, Canada.

For the past 15 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.

"It's been a great hobby thus far, dreaming up - building all sorts of different minature equipment from kits or from scratch for this "mining" project. If it wasn't for this mining project I probably would have lost of interest in this hobby by now b/c once the models are built - the novelty of how they work & perform would wear off with no task to be accomplished them," he notes in another post.

Here are samples of the videos he's recorded over the years.


View: http://youtu.be/AjUOo5XLLJw



View: http://youtu.be/nXaDfU6VS6U



View: http://youtu.be/c3CBUGVrjZs



View: http://youtu.be/xZEpxNqcpZ0



View: http://youtu.be/RyvZEI4J7Do



View: http://youtu.be/IB1u1johUSA



View: http://youtu.be/pmKAZVoRzEY



View: http://youtu.be/ds334IrIRL8



View: http://youtu.be/iW1eIxqScg8



View: http://youtu.be/98nh5ZmTWsI



View: http://youtu.be/bmcC2bzJjME


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I want to hand him a shovel
 
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  • #7
underground tunnels all around your property
 
webby said:
not much there?
Click to expand...

Saskatchewan.jpg
 
He should do something more practical... like build a moat around his house and add a drawbridge to the front door, lol. Ah well, to each their own I guess?
 
REGINA — Joe Murray is steadily ridding his basement of dirt — but he’s doing it by sitting on a chair in the corner of the room, about 10 feet away, using radio controlled trucks and diggers to slowly work away at the soil.
Perched on a mound of dirt, a bright yellow digger extends up, reaches out and excavates a chunk of earth, dumping it into a yellow truck; it’s just like any other work site, but in this case, the machinery is pint-sized.
Murray, who lives in a small community in southern Saskatchewan, has been at the project for years now, using it as a way to pass the long, cold winters.
It all started in 2002 after some torrential rainfall.
“I’d done some work and hadn’t put the eaves back up, so a chunk of dirt kind of fell off the wall in the northeast corner because it was soaked with water,” he explained.
“It didn’t damage the foundations or anything, but it was a real mess, so I took the radio controlled trucks down there and cleaned up the mess.”
From there, Murray developed the idea to excavate the basement.
“Essentially I’m just doing it for fun in winter when I have time to kill,” he said.
“I’m busy cropping and herding cattle for 10 months of the year, and it’s not like there’s a deadline to get this done. When it’s 30 below it’s just a nice place to be, down there tinkering.”
Murray said he’s been fascinated with heavy machinery ever since he was young and growing up on the family farm.
In his late teens he started tinkering with and restoring a classic car “to chase girls,” he laughed.
“Then, as a young guy in my early ‘20s, I was custom combining in the mid-west US for six or seven months, and when I came back here pretty much everyone I grew up with had moved away to the city ... so I was looking for a hobby,” he said.
He found that hobby in 1996 when, on a visit to Medicine Hat, he came across a radio controlled truck.
A couple of years later, as he was surfing the Internet, he found construction model kits in Germany.
At first, he tracked them down through a supplier in the States but, for the past four or five years, he’s ordered them directly from Germany.
He and some buddies then started a radio controlled truck and construction website and forum where like-minded folk gather and share tips and tricks.
“People have been bugging me for years to film (the excavation), but for years we just had dial-up here in rural Saskatchewan ... but in 2007 when I got high-speed I started filming it,” he said.
Over the past couple of days his basement has taken on a life of its own, with media from as far away as Australia hearing about his radio control project and getting in touch.
Some, though, haven’t been kind — like a radio station in Ontario who phoned him and made fun of what he’s doing.
“They think I’m just some 40-year-old bachelor playing with Tonka toys or something,” he said.
“Some comments on the Internet have been really negative as well. I mean, it’s just a hobby, I don’t understand the cynicism.”
When the busy farming season kicks in again in the spring, his trucks and diggers will mostly sit dormant again, but Murray says he’ll keep at it as long as he remains interested.
Head to the Leader-Post website to check out Murray’s videos of his digger in action.

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