In my previous post, I showed some pictures of a trench dig with our DIY excavator. I just thought I would post up some pictures of how the machine crawls around the land. I still think this is one of the funnier aspects of this machine, since it doesn’t have powered wheels. Instead, it crawls around using its arm for grabbing the ground, lifting up the front of the vehicle so the spikes that cut into the ground when digging are in the air, pulling itself forward on the passive rear wheels, and then moving the arm forward again for the next crawl. This process is referred to as “knuckling”.

I took these pictures from across the pond while K’Tanawat was trying out his hand and knuckling the excavator to get it from the parking area to the dig site:

Reach the arm forward

Push the shovel against the ground to lift the front of the excavator off the ground and pull itself forward

Lower the front of the excavator and lift the arm up again

Extend the arm forward for the next “step”

Lift the front of the vehicle off the ground

Pull the vehicle forward

At my fastest, I can take a step in something like 5-10 seconds. Since one step is about 45cm, this comes out to a whopping ~5cm per second, which results in it easily taking 15-30 min to get from the parking area to the dig site. In this case, it took more like 45 min since K’Tanawat has never done this before and was just starting to learn the process.