Construction Equipment

Construction equipment is a really broad term, though undoubtedly it is familiar to those who deal with building, tearing down or dismantling buildings or large machines. Construction equipment is mostly associated with various earthwork operations, and is also recognized as heavy trucks, heavy machines, heavy equipment, heavy vehicles, heavy hydraulics or engineering equipment.

There is a number of machines that fall into this category and they are all designed to perform different task on a construction site, but in short it can be stated that all those machines comprise five basic equipment systems, namely: traction, implement, power train, structure and information. A primary source of motion of such machines are usually hydraulic drives.

Among dozens of machines that can be described as construction equipment there are tractors, skidders, bulldozers, excavators, cranes, forklifts, backhoes, loaders, dump trucks, drilling machines – all in different sizes and with various strength and scopes.

Construction equipment is basically essential when it comes to any sort of construction work. Due to a great demand for such machines a multitude of companies do their best to meet the market’s expectations. The most popular manufacturers as for 2011 are Caterpillar Inc., Volvo Construction Equipment, Komatsu and Hitachi – all of them and numerous others have a really broad offer to fulfill the customers’ needs.

The Smallest Excavators

Caterpillar Inc., widely known as CAT is an American based corporation dealing with designing, manufacturing, marketing and selling machinery and engines as well as selling insurance and financial products to customers all around the world. The brand is very recognizable due to a characteristic yellow colored design and CAT logo, which can be spotted on every continent. Caterpillar Inc. specializes in tractors, bulldozers, rollers, wheel loaders and many more types of heavy duty machinery, but is probably best known for their excavators. Caterpillar excavators come in various types and sizes.

Caterpillar offers excavators in four different groups: Mini, Small, Medium and Large Hydraulic Excavators but at all times they can be considered a great investment. Within last few years especially Car® Mini Hydraulic Excavators became wildly popular among contractors who are often required to dig in small quarters. Besides, such machines are often really easy to use, hence require less training. Those excavators are now often equipped with features that make the work easier and more comfortable and, above all, possible in places where it would be impossible to use a normal-sized excavator. The range is also surprising – an excavator of a size of Caterpillar 304, that is 8.2 ft tall, can reach 10.3 ft deep when digging with a standard stick – that is impressive.

Hitachi excavators

Hitachi Construction Machinery is a worldwide company originally established in Japan in 1910. At first it was only an electric motor repair shop, but soon it developed and no later than in 1924 Hitachi released their first DC electric locomotives. Since then Hitachi has proven to be one of the most popular and reliable machinery producers all around the world – Hitachi started opening their foreign branches and nowadays Hitachi machines can be found on almost every continent. In 2002 Hitachi Construction Machinery America joined forces with another machinery mogul – John Deere. The companies conduct joined marketing operations in both Americas with a great benefit to both.

Hitachi Construction Machinery manufactures a number of products for three branches, that is mining, construction and forestry. Their most popular products are crawlers, recycle machines, loaders, rollers and excavators. All of their machines have been gaining loads of favorable opinions among satisfied customers.

Hitachi excavators, for that matter, are advertised, and actually perceived as “unstoppable”. Hitachi excavators are built to face the hardest construction works.  Like all Hitachi products, they are powerful – no matter the size, be it mini excavators lifting up to six tons, or large ones, that can easily deal with over 40 tons of load. Moreover, Hitachi excavators are productive and technologically advanced, which in turn leads to great efficiency, shorter time needed to perform a certain task and more enjoyable work.

John Deere to celebrate a milestone

Backhoeloaders are special sort of digging equipment. They can seem like a kind of a hybrid of front loaders and excavators. Typical backhoes, also called back actors or rear actors, have a digging bucked attached at the back, whereas at the front they can be tractors or front loaders.

Backhoes have been in use since mid ‘40s and they have proven to be very useful pieces of equipment in digging industry all over the world. The first company to put them on the market was Wain-Roy Corporation of Hubbardston. In the ‘50s numerous other agricultural corporation spotted their chance and started producing there tractor-like vehicles, most of them to a great success. However, the leader on the market was the JCB company, with its founder Joseph Cybil Bamford – for that reason in the United Kingdom and Ireland backhoes are known almost entirely by the name JCBs – the company’s name became a generic trademark.

One of the companies to invest in production of backhoes was Deere & Co., better known under the name of the company’s founder – John Deere. The first model of John Deere backhoe entered the market over 40 years ago, and – according to general manager at the John Deere Dubuque Works, Byron Taylor, ever since then they have been a one of Deere’s key products. On March 1^st 2013 Deere & Co. celebrated the production of 250.000^th backhoe. This only proves the products of this company are really something to take into consideration while looking for a good piece of equipment.

Volvo 330 – an excavator to consider

Excavators have been in use for decades now. They make the work more efficient, faster and much more simple, so it’s only logical that manufacturers have been working hard to improve their products as much as possible. There are loads of used excavators on the market right now but certainly there are a few that deserve a closer look.

One of such excavators is Volvo EC330,which comes in as many as four different variants: Volvo EC 330 CL, Volvo EC 330 CL ME, Volvo EC 330 BLC and Volvo EC BLC ME. They all differ slightly when considering specifications, but for all of them one thing is sure – they’re strong and they’re worth their price. All models have a mono broom measuring 20.4 or 21.2 ft and turbocharged Volvo diesel engine with gross power of 265 hp. The model’s  rated horsepower output is also impressive – it’s 184 bucket capacity, that is 1.25 to 2.5 m². Volvo EC330 reaches also a really amazing operating weight from 33.7 to 36.6 tons. All that makes this particular model, or rather its four variants, really worth considering when looking for an excavator.

Terex RH 400 – the king of excavators

Without any doubt, Terex RH 400 is the biggest hydraulic mining excavator in the world – 2.233.000 lb use-weight is not a small number. The giant is 33.4 ft high, 28.3 ft wide and 27.7 ft long and it alone weights over 2.2 Glb. It is really huge and its traction force amounts up to 889.000 lb. RH 400 has a reference bucket of 58.9 yd³, which equals 198.00 lb. Loading shovel can get as high as 66.3 ft.

Image source: www.motorstown.com

A machine like that needs a lot of power. RH 400 is equipped with two 16-cyl engines that together can develop power of 4398 horsepower.

Mining excavator Terex RH 400 was first presented in Dortmund in 1997 and since then only six machines were built. They were all shipped to America – one to work in mine in the USA and five to work in Canada.