Whether you’re at work on a major construction site or conducting maintenance on a highway, heavy equipment is a necessity. These sturdy machines and vehicles help contractors complete projects on time and on budget.
Many factors influence the price of heavy equipment, including age. Typically, older equipment will sell for less than well-maintained, low-hour machinery.
Construction
Construction equipment is used to perform important tasks like clearing, grading and lifting. Without these machines, such tasks would have taken hundreds of manual laborers and weeks to complete.
Some examples of construction equipment are bulldozers and excavators, which use a wide metal blade at the front to push dirt, debris and other materials around. Wheel loaders are another construction machine that has multiple attachments that can be switched out depending on the project at hand, such as buckets, augers and backhoes.
Other construction machinery includes tower cranes, which are fixed to a building and can be lifted with the aid of cables, wire ropes and sheaves. Other types of hoisting equipment include telehandlers, which have a long telescopic boom that can be raised or lowered and has different types of arrangements like forklifts, cabins, lifting jibs etc attached to the end of it. They are also commonly used for loading and unloading cargo. Other common construction equipment is compactors, which help to compact materials and road rollers which assist in the laying of asphalt roads.
Forestry
Forestry equipment clears and prepares land for construction, farming and other uses. Workers operate forestry machines like the skidder, which moves logs from the woods to storage houses and gets its name from how the opposite ends “skid” across the ground as it goes. It’s available in both track and wheel models depending on the terrain, and a grapple model can pick up multiple logs at once for faster transportation.
Foresters also use forestry equipment to trim and process trees, as well as mulch and remove stumps and other debris from the ground. They may also operate a backhoe, a tractor-sized machine that digs dirt and rock for construction or repair work.
A common tool for felling and processing trees is the harvester, a wheeled or tracked machine that cuts tree stems to pre-programmed lengths with its multipurpose cutting head. Forestry companies may also opt for a felled buncher or knuckleboom loader, both of which are designed to handle large loads of trees quickly and efficiently.
Mining
Mining is the extraction of valuable metals and minerals from the earth. Throughout history, it has been a major source of income for many countries. It can also be very destructive to the environment.
Several types of heavy equipment are used in the mining process. Initially, it starts with exploration and discovery of potential mineral deposits. Once a mine is located, it goes through the mining cycle, which involves excavation and processing of the mineral deposit.
Some of the most common pieces of mining equipment are crushers and wheel loaders. These tools break down large rocks into smaller pieces that can be easily transported. They can also be used to clear the mining site of debris after a task is completed. Motor graders are very helpful in paving a road for mining trucks to safely transport materials. They can also create grooves in soft material like soil that drain standing water. Dragline excavators are massive machines that help miners relocate materials in surface-level operations.
Oil & Gas
The oil and gas industry is a huge factor in the world’s economy. It takes many different types of equipment to extract the natural resources from beneath the earth and prepare them for storage or transportation. Some of the most important tools used in this industry include drills, trucks, and other forms of transportation.
The upstream segment of the oil and gas industry is responsible for finding crude oil and natural gas deposits as well as drilling them. It is also responsible for transporting the crude oil and natural gas to storage facilities.
Tubular equipment is used to handle the piping system during the oil and gas production process. Examples of this equipment include casing tong handling tools, smart rackers, and horizontal tubular equipment. Other important equipment includes sight flow indicators that are available in a variety of sizes and working pressures. These devices are designed to be able to withstand strenuous conditions and therefore are built with care for quality standards.
