Excavators

Excavators are a must on job sites where there is a need for lifting heavy loads of soil. An excavator is a popular earthmoving vehicle featuring movable tracks, rotating cab, arm and bucket. These parts offer excellent mobility and digging power that allows excavators to perform numerous functions, from breaking holes to digging trenches, excavating mines and lifting waste materials.

Common Uses of Excavators

Excavators are used for various industrial and contractor needs such as building construction, road construction, demolitions and mining.
These forms of large excavation equipment also come in different types, including smaller machines that handle drilling and digging functions up to large excavators that have several tools meant for heavier duty projects. When our team decides on the excavator to use for a particular job, we consider the speed and the size as well as the specific working conditions like the types of soil and the amount of available space.

The most frequently used types of excavators include:

• Crawlers
• Skid steer excavators
• Dragline excavators
• Suction excavators
• Long reach excavators

Parts and Attachments of Excavators

The excavator’s design makes this construction equipment useful for several versatile purposes. Attachments, arms, booms and hydraulic cylinders provide holding and digging functionalities. On the other hand, the house-like cab gives controls to the driver to allow him to direct the equipment. The wheels and rotating platform offer the necessary mobility for lifting and removing debris from work sites.

An excavator also uses various hydraulic attachments with different purposes. Aside from the bucket, some other common attachments are the auger, grapple, breaker, quick coupler, and lamp.

Auger

Boring into the ground is made possible through attaching the auger. Hydraulic circuits power this helical attachment with the ability of drilling deep holes as well as reaching over objects. Augers are available in various sizes and specifications for different terrains and digging conditions. The range of an auger can range from 4 inches up to 50 inches and could dig a maximum of 32 feet.

Breaker

The breaker is the same with a jackhammer but is bigger in size. These attachments have the ability of providing as much as 1,000 pounds of impact energy and can be used for breaking into tougher surfaces such as concrete and stone.

Buckets

The most common attachments you can see on excavators, buckets are steel attachments with teeth-like edges known for their scooping and digging abilities. Buckets are available in several varieties. Ditching buckets are the most common ones meant for grading stones. There are also trenching buckets used for digging trenches.

Clamp

A clamp allows the excavator operator to pick up huge materials like concrete and tree stumps that are too big for buckets to handle. These attachments could be used as pieces in a grapple or with buckets. Clamps can be attached and detached easily from an excavator.

Coupler

A coupler lets you switch fast between the tools and attachments without a crew. It comes in handy when moving between several processes and tasks on the job site.