Big rock versus little truck: Witness the dramatic and harrowing one-minute 48-second saga in Low-Definition Vertical Video with rare expert commentary right here!
You could skip to the end and watch this poor old Ranger get what was most likely the final flogging of its life, but it’s so much more amusing to enjoy this clip from the beginning as the loader operator valiantly tries to lower this huge rock into the truck bed gingerly while onlookers provide advice from the sidelines.
Ultimately, care and consideration are abandoned for just pulling the drop lever and You Won’t Believe What Happens Next!
For the record: If this rock had been placed in the bed of the Ranger as gently as the loader operator initially seemed to be going for, it still would have sunk the back half of the truck like a bathtub raft in the tumultuous sea of a Hokusai painting.
But there would have been a better chance of the truck being salvageable had the weight been introduced slowly. Put another way: Maybe things would have bent instead of snapped. As it sits by the end of the clip, I’m guessing the parts of that Ranger that hold its suspension together have been too misshapen to ever go back together correctly again.
How much do you think that rock weighed, anyway? Geoscience outfit EduMine has a table listing the weight of different materials by tons per cubic yard and plenty of other similar scales are out there. But my last geology class was too long ago for me to identify this boulder, so, I’ll look forward to reviewing the comments for guesses later.
The real question on everyone’s mind is: Did the truck move after somebody got behind the wheel and tried to drive off. (And, uh, how were these goofballs planning to remove the rock from the Ranger when it got to its destination?)
Hat tip, begrudgingly, to Mike Ballaban