Auger Torque & Avant help create Game of Thrones hotel
Whilst we are all suffering, or enjoying high temperatures in the land down under it’s easy to forget that large parts of the northern hemisphere are currently covered in a thick blanket of ice and snow. It is in that part of the world, more precisely Finland, where these ice-cold earth (or snow) moving images were taken.
Covering an area of about 20 000 square metres in remote Lapland, SnowVillage is a seasonal resort that consists of a Snow Hotel, with snow rooms and suites, Ice Restaurant, Ice Bar and Ice Chapel. This year, the entire hotel, made possible through a collaboration with HBO Nordic is “Game Of Thrones” themed. Within the hotel you can find a life sized iron throne with swords, a scary Braavosi Hall of Faces and even a white walker with glowing blue eyes.
The hotel itself is constructed each year using a staggering 20 million kilos of snow and 350,000 kilos of ice by an international team of ice sculptors before it finally all melts away again to be reconstructed the following year.
How is this relevant to the earthmoving industry though you may ask yourself? Those of you familiar with auger drives may have noticed the familiar shape of an Auger Torque Earth Drill, even though it is actually painted in Avant green in this case. Avant is one of Auger Torque’s main OEM partners in Scandinavia as well as the rest of the world and approached Auger Torque’s UK team to help design and build a special ice auger and frame to suit their Avant 760i Loader. The combination the engineering team came up which exceeded everyone’s expectations and the Avant XHD92 auger drive (based on the Auger Torque 4500MAX) performed just as well in sub zero temperatures as it would have in the soaring temperatures of the Australian environment it was originally designed to cope with.
“I’ve got very positive feedback”, explained Tapio Torkkel from Avant Tecno Finland, “previously it took about 10-12 hours to make a passage through the heavily packed snow and ice wall. With a thickness of about 2-3 meters, this used to be done by a two-man team using chain saws and therefore was quite time and labour intensive. With the auger the first cut can now be completed in only about five minutes. The team calculated that the auger saved manpower worth three months as the whole layout was actually planned around the new auger attachment and this strategy paid out. It’s the most awesome castle Lapland Hotels made so far and I’ve visited a few.”
If you would like to visit this ultra cool hotel yourself you should probably hurry though, it generally gets booked out in a short period of time and come April of each year it usually starts to melt into oblivion.