Mining University

In addition to huge mining equipment, I also like the 'regular' construction equipment used by home builders and other general contractors. These pieces of equipment are large enough to be called 'big' by people who haven't seen a 300 ton truck up close and personal.

When I saw that they were starting to work on the housing development by my house I just had to stop and take some pictures of the steel they had parked along the road. This area was originally slated for development in 2008 but the housing crash shelved most of the construction in Reno until recently.

John Deere 724K Wheel Loader

The John Deere 724K Wheel Loader has a 264 horsepower engine and a bucket capacity of 4 cubic yards. It looks nice in the light of the setting sun too.

Caterpillar D6R Track Dozer

This Cat D6R Dozer has been around a bit more than the Loader above but it still has a 200 hp engine and an 18 foot blade.

Volvo EC460BLC Hydraulic Excavator

The Volvo Excavator boasts a 2.7 cubic yard bucket and a 239 hp engine.

John Deere 872GP Motor Grader

This John Deere grader is almost 35 feet long with a 283 hp motor.

Caterpillar 631D Motor Scraper

The Cat 631D scraper is 46.8 feet long, has a 450 hp engine and can carry 31 cubic yards of material that it has scraped off in 19 inch deep cuts.

Steamboat Parkway construction project as of 19 September 2013

The project on Steamboat Parkway is just getting re-started. The ground has been cleared and foundation/infrastructure work is moving forward. Things are about to get exciting.

I was trying to export a hatched polygon from Maptek Vulcan and import it into the Modular dispatch system the other day when I learned something disconcerting about Vulcan's ability to export hatch patterns to dxf. Namely, that it can't.

I was disappointed when Modular would only import the polygon and not the hatch pattern from my dxf file but I didn't think the problem was with Vulcan until I tried to import the shape into AutoCAD and got the same result. I can't believe that after 33 years of continuous development Maptek hasn't created a tool to export hatch patterns to the universal CAD file format.

When I asked Maptek about the problem they told me, of course hatch patterns work with the export tool. They had tested the ability of Vulcan to export and import hatch patterns by exporting a hatched polygon from Vulcan as a dxf and then importing that same file back into Vulcan. When I asked if they had tried importing the dxf into AutoCAD I was met with a really long delay before receiving their email stating that 'Currently the dxf/dwg export option is exporting the hatching information, but it does not appear to be read by AutoCAD.'

I'm sorry, but I think we can all agree that AutoCAD is the defacto standard for dxf files. If the Vulcan export of a hatched polygon to dxf isn't importing correctly to AutoCAD the problem is with Vulcan. AutoCAD doesn't seem to have a problem exporting hatch patterns to a dxf file that can be read by Vulcan.

This bug has been logged as VUL-25951. Call Maptek and ask about their timeline to fix this shortcoming next time you can't export hatch patterns to dxf.