My first stop of the day was the Mobile Crane. The operator and materials were from Kiewit, and they put on a demonstration for us. They enlisted a student to help direct the operator, and taught us the correct signals to use. A chart of signals (shown below-a little blurry, i know) is also painted directly onto the crane itself.
The demonstration was placing a ceiling section with HVAC onto a wall section. 
In somewhere around 5-10 minutes that ceiling was successfully placed and proceeded to be shored up by someone drilling holes and connecting it to the wooden planks at the corners. The almost finished product is shown below.
Next I went to check out a cement truck from Chandler Inc. A driver named Ricky talked to us about it and told us that it was a brand new Green truck which cost $160,000. A pretty penny huh? $12,000 of this was for a special exhaust stack which constantly cleans itself and releases literally NO exhaust. Ever.
Cool right? Ricky also told us that Chandler has 100s of trucks in total. Here is a picture of the entire truck.
The third stop was to see cutting edge surveying equipment from American Infrastructure. They had some really cool equipment and explained to us how it worked. The equipment can be transferred through gps directly to a bulldozer operator and tell him exactly what to do. The level of precision with these tools is amazing. This equipment made the entire process automated, and has made the traditional method of staking and taking points almost entirely obsolete. The actual computer models and drawings of projects can also be loaded directly onto the screen with the equipment, which is shown below.
The next stop was the crane simulator. While I didn't get the joy to operate it myself I did witness a few classmates and could definitely see the benefits (and fun) of having one of these. Walter (will be introduced at the next stop) mentioned how these simulators aren't just for fun, that the actualy operators are trained on them before starting the job. He said that the actual job they will be doing can be programmed onto the simulator and they can essentially do a practice run of what they will be doing on site. This has obvious benefits such as saving time that would be wasted looking at plans and figuring out approaches, and also greatly decreasing the odds that a mistake will be made. Like the surveying equipment, the drawings and models can be directly loaded onto a screen and integrated into the simulator. Below are a few pictures of the images that are utilized on the screen, and of the simulator itself.
My final stop was checking out the motor grader which was also from American Infrastructure. Walter was here to talk to us about it and really gave a lot of good info (as cited in the previous paragraph). He was a civil engineer at Virginia Tech and loved the place so much he decided to hang around and get his masters in construction from the Myers-Lawson School of Construction. Like most of the technology we saw, the grader was equipped with gps which allowed the soil to be moved in accordance to the gps within a hundreth of an inch from the correct location. Pretty amazing stuff in my opinion. What really amazes me is the fact that they snuck this gigantic piece of equipment in and parked it practically next to us without any of us even noticing. I still have no idea when or how this happened, but oh well, at least we got to see it. Below is a picture of the motor grader.
This pretty much wraps up my day, a very informative and actually pretty darn fun day. I look forward to more classes being like this now that the weather is so nice! Hook us up Mr. Mills ;)
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