Sam Morris

The Dancing Diggers perform Tuesday at the sprawling ConExpo convention outside the Las Vegas Convention Center.

By Brendan Buhler

Thu, Mar 13, 2008 (2 a.m.)

Sam Morris

Aerialists perform Tuesday during the convention. The real stars of the show are big machines including backhoes, telehandlers, tower cranes and concrete crushers.

There were nine dancers for nine construction equipment drivers. The drivers wore bowler hats and the dancers wore bee-striped leotards and black and yellow feather fans.

Then the music started.

Welcome to ConExpo, the construction convention where 120,000 people meet big machines and the ghost of Busby Berkeley does the choreography. Stand around the arena J.C. Bamford Excavators Ltd. has constructed and witness the Dancing Diggers perform some razzmatazz with the beautiful Equilibrium dance troupe.

As the drivers board their backhoe loaders and telehandlers, the dancers hand off their feathers, climb into rings and are hoisted into the air. They sit in the rings, dancing, kicking and pivoting.

Below, the drivers push down their backhoes and loaders and telescoping arms, pushing against the blacktop so the vehicle cabs, the parts they’re sitting in, lift off the ground.

The music switches to Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

(It should, in all fairness, be noted that one of the JCB telehandlers has a warning sticker: “BEWARE, MACHINE SWING.”)

The dancers dangle by their legs. The telehandlers retract their arms and begin racing in circles underneath the backhoe loaders, which are still pushing themselves up in the air like dying bugs.

Now the women are dangling from silk ribbons. The backhoes and the telehandlers chase each other in circles.

Pop-poppity-pop — fireworks go off. American flags unfurl from the telehandler arms.

Is it excessive? Here?

Please.

The entrance outside the Las Vegas Convention Center — and it has to be outside because the convention not only fills the center, the Hilton and the Riviera but also the center’s parking lots — is guarded by two Soviet-looking statues that could be titled “Heroic Workers Preparing to Bludgeon Oppressors.”

You barely notice the statues because the parking lots are full of giant migratory tower cranes, concrete sprayers, concrete crushers — why, some of the asphalt kilns could eat a single-family home.

Closer to the ground is the world’s largest pipe rammer, the Grundoram Apollo (manufactured by TT Technologies, makers of Grundoburst pipe bursters). Or perhaps you are in the market for a 3,076-pound drill bit? Or maybe you want the giant red-bodied, black-shafted jackhammer that caused one visiting Cal Poly San Luis Obispo student to stop, lower his beer and say, “Now that’s a sexy hammer.”

The equipment boasts bright yellow, blue and orange colors and much of it sports terrifying warning signs, including one on a giant pile driver that says, “It is strictly forbidden to work or stand under the hammer.”

Roger that.

Elsewhere, safety signs show a restroom-sign stick man dying awful, awful Mr. Bill-style deaths — crushed by steamrollers, torn in two by “swinging uppers,” dragged into giant gears or being injected by a leaking hydraulic hose, which, the sign notes, “can cause gangrene.”

ConExpo (its full name, ConExpo-Con/Agg, reflects the important contributions of the aggregate industry) is a construction convention held every three years that draws attendees from Europe, Asia, South America and the southern United States. Despite the construction downturn as the U.S. economy cools, the 2008 show is expected to break the 2005 show’s record attendance by attracting more than 125,000 people.

Even though it is nearly the same size (fewer people, but more floor space) as the massive Consumer Electronics Show, which draws 150,000 people to Las Vegas, ConExpo lacks that show’s exploding anthill energy. ConExpo is mellow. Possibly this is because CES is fueled by coffee, soda and radiator fluid-colored energy drinks with names like “Adrenoshot Xtreme: Feel the Seizure,” and ConExpo is lubricated by beer. Pretty much everyone in attendance either has one in hand, has just set down an empty on a forklift’s treads or is asking where he can get a cold one.

Maybe the beer is why people have trouble with the booth exhibits, especially the ones where passers-by are invited to use a backhoe to scoop basketballs off construction cones or roll giant pairs of dice.

Take, for instance, the one guy who struggled to roll the giant dice. He couldn’t get the backhoe’s scoop to flip. Instead, he kept moving its arm up and down onto the ground, lifting the backhoe. Eventually, he knocked the dice out.

“Did I win?” he said.

“Yeah,” a booth attendant said, “you won.”

“What’d I win? What’d I win?”

“A water bottle? Is it full of beer?”

It wasn’t, yet.