When American Stone’s 20 ton hoist quit working, the local landscape stone business came to a grinding (sawing) halt.

The 20 ton crane is used all day long to lift heavy stone to feed the saw that cuts them into beautiful sliced pieces resembling a deli’s meat-cutter.

The diamond tipped saw blade is 10 foot diameter, and provides a water cooled slice through native Indiana limestone, granite, and sandstone.  The blade travels horizontally via a rack and pinion drive and is automatically lowered 2 ½” at each end of travel via chain driven dual ball screws to achieve consecutively deeper cuts until the stone’s sliced all the way through, then sent off to be landscape rock.

The crane was repaired after a long day of troubleshooting, all with no new parts required.  

Vigo Engineering does landscaping too! (sort of)  

NASA Kennedy Space Center 20 ton Crane for Galileo Satelite

Raising the spirits of exploration pioneers Galileo & Magellan at Kennedy Space Center required a very special 20 ton overhead bridge crane with multiple free-fall overspeed failsafe controls incorporated into the design. The Galileo-to-Jupiter satellite project was an ambitious project incorporating scientists from 6 countries and our 20 ton crane was utilized to assist in the building of the Space Center’s Galileo satellite, which resulted in our company being named Kennedy Space Center’s Small Business Contractor of the Year.

The project was a fast-track design and build, including full load free-fall testing on a complete structural runway built prior to shipment. Rose-Hulman professor Irv Hooper’s detailed inertia calculations and Carl Norris’s structural creativity proved invaluable, all due to the rush to get Galileo on an upcoming space shuttle launch but the Challenger explosion ended up pushing Galileo back several years.  Galileo was finally launched on Atlantis, STS-34, taking 6 years to get to Jupiter, travelling nearly 3 Billion miles total, then was purposely destroyed into Jupiters’ atmosphere in 2003 after completing multiple scientific missions.

Our crane was then used to build NASA’s satellite Magellan which was built to map Venus.  Magellan was also deployed on an Atlantis Shuttle.  

Vigo Engineering loves science!

 

 

Coal Mine Haul Trucks are the life blood of a coal mine, hauling overburden dirt and coal to their destinations. Typically 250 to 450 tons gross weight, these nearly 1 million pound trucks require enormous tires just to carry the weight, ranging from 10 feet to 14 feet in diameter. A typical mold just to press a rubber tire this large weighs 50 tons by itself. "Vigo Engineering digs Coal."

 

 

Getting ready to go full throttle in the 2570 cab after a hard day of work on the dragline cranes. The drag and lift ropes on the 2570 are 4 3/4" diameter, and the drums are 12 feet diameter. The bucket is large enough to hold 6 vans. All this just to remove 150 feet of dirt to get to the precious coal. As we say, "Vigo Engineering digs Coal"