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.
