Excavating a basement using professional machinery is nothing new but doing it with radio controlled (RC) scaled models is something unheard of. Welcome to the little big world of Joe, from Saskatchewan, Canada.

For the past 7 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.

Take a look at the pictures Joe posted on the forum as well as a sample of the videos he’s recorded over the years after the break, and then head over to the comments area for your thoughts.

*Corrections: A previous version of this article said Joe had been working on the project since 1997. Joe came in contact with Carscoops and told us that he was practicing the hobby of radio controlled models since 1996, but began the basement project in June of 2005

Update! If you want to know more about Joe and how this hobby came to be, click here to read his story

Photo Gallery

Video

Story References: Scale4x4rc via Houston-Imports