Category Archives: construction equipment

How to tighten the tracks on heavy equipment

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Though been one of the most important components in the construction industry, heavy earth moving equipment is sadly the most ignored element of all. Construction companies are all running a race against time. All they know is to complete the assigned work in time or for that matter before time so that they can catch up with another piece of work and in this entire process they fail to remember that they need to give a bit of attention to an important segment which is the earth moving heavy machines. Construction companies are heavily dependent on mechanics whenever they see an issue with any of their equipment. This is not a bad thing to do but depending completely on something can also take a toll on your work when you do not find the team around to get your work done and you do not know how to get things moving in the absence of the team. This can certainly leave you in a high and dry situation and can also cost a fortune to the company.

So the ground rule is you got to take enough notice of your heavy equipment and learn a few things that you can do to fix things in the absence of a mechanic. One of the most common problems is with the track of the heavy equipment. They come out way too often and you are unable to figure out how to get rid of this issue. Well, you will not be able to get rid of it completely but maintaining the overall machine on a timely manner which also takes into account the track of the machine can certainly reduce the frequency of the problem. But when you have encountered a problem like this and have nobody around to help you out, here are few things that you can do yourself to get it track back.

Firstly, you have to ensure that you turn the upper part of the machine so that the boom is at a 90 degree angle to the travel direction. After that you got to check that the bucket floor level is to the ground by positioning the arm upright to the ground. You then need to press down the boom so that the track is elevated on one side and then gradually it is completely suspended above ground level. Once that done, you need to ensure that the track makes several revolutions so that the debris and other dirt can come out. Once that’s done, stop the track from moving and move in the cab. Ask your assistant to measure the bottom of the track frame to the track shoe and compare it with the measurements given in the user manual.

You may also have to inject grease in the small hole of the track frame and for this purpose use a grease injector. This will help to tighten the track. Once the tracks are tightened, make use of a wrench to loosen the fitting and get the track on the ground. Just in case you see any issues and can’t figure out to fix it, stop there and seek help of an expert.

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Heavy Equipment Salvage

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Every living and non-living thing has an expiry date attached to it which means that it will most likely get redundant or become obsolete after a certain span of time. Heavy equipment also have an expiry date which is not known. It all depends upon how you use the machine and what care you take to ensure that the age of the machine is lengthened. Having said that, there will be a time when you have to finally do away with your most lovable heavy equipment and bid adieu to it. Does this mean that you get nothing for the machine for which you spent so much? Well, there is something that you can do to get some money by selling the equipment to a heavy equipment salvage company. These companies are ready to buy the entire equipment or just parts of the machine and will pay the correct price for it.

When would you know that it is time that you need to approach the salvage company? The moment you realize that your heavy equipment is costing you more on maintenance and is also causing issues while working. These are signs that it is time that you do away with the machine and replace it with a new one. Simultaneously, it is would be foolish to just give away the metal for nothing when you can make some money by selling it. This is perhaps the right moment when you should approach the heavy equipment salvage company and sell them the machine that does not function at all. If you feel that they will not buy the stuff, then you would be happy to know that they will be pleased to take it from you. What they do is they extract the good parts from the machine and sell it to users who are in need of that part. In case, if the part is not working fine then they will repair it and then sell it in the market.

The heavy equipment salvage company deals with all kinds of heavy equipment right from bulldozers, excavators, graders, forklifts, cranes and loaders. You give the machine in working or in non-working condition and they will take it from you. One thing that you must be aware before you sell the machine to them is the price they offer you. It is advisable that you approach more than 1 salvage company if you want to do away with your existing machine. Try to get the rates from them that they are ready to offer you and then take a calculative judgment. Your decision should be quite rational and you may also consider using the amount received from the salvage company towards paying the down payment for the new machine.

In this way you do not have to lose anything. It is kind of a win-win situation for you. In case if you want them to come to your place and take the machine as you do not wish to pay the shipping cost, they might even be ready to do so. However, it is better that you talk to them about it in advance

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Heavy Equipment Operator Jobs

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Jobs that demand excellence pays handsomely to whose who has the ability to do justice with it and the temperament to deliver it without any delay. There are many such jobs that are ready to pay good money. However, the only thing that they demand is quality work and highly skilled labor. It is not that the ones who are semi-skilled are not fit for the job. It is just that they are not yet ready to claim the high package which an expert in the same domain is. So the thumb rule is that in order to deserve a high package, it is very essential that you show some character in your work. You will be rewarded only when you fit in the category of people who deserve the reward for their hard work.

If you are looking for such a job that truly rewards people who their hard work and excellence, you should be aspiring to become a heavy equipment operator. When you are an operator, you get the opportunity to learn a lot of things about the machine. Many operators also know how to fix the machine they are working on in case there appears to be some sort of problem. They do not lay their hands in grave issues though but ideally knows how to solve a particular problem.

Heavy equipment operator jobs are in plenty across United States. Many construction and mining companies are looking for experienced and skilled operators who have been operating different kinds of machines for a long time. They are also ready to pay them handsomely but the only crisis is with getting competent operators. Construction companies are experiencing serious problems in recruiting skilled operators. For some projects they can’t take the service of semi-skilled operators and only want skilled men for the job. These projects are quite important for them and hiring a person who has limited knowledge or experience in operating heavy equipment can be a big danger for the project as well as the people involved with the project. It may also rupture the rapport with the client if the clients does not get to see quality work happening.

It is very crucial to join a renowned institute or a training center that deals with teaching people how to operate heavy equipment. They may have different courses. They may have something for the beginners, then for the ones who want to learn more and finally advanced courses. After which, they get the opportunity to work with expert operators during site visits. They get the chance to interact with them, shoot questions at them and get suitable answers. They can even try their hands on the machine under the guidance of the expert operator. Once they are through with the training program, they can apply as apprentice in a construction company from where they will start getting exposure into the practical aspect of being an operator.

It will be only through experience that they will garnish their skills and knowledge and their quality will be reflected in their work. Once they become competent, searching for a high paid job will not be difficult.

Patience is the key for any construction business

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The ground rule of any business being big or small is to be patient and hit hard when you get the opportunity. Business is all about different phases. You may be doing well in your business but soon you will discover that things are not going well for you and with each passing day you see things moving out of your hand. These are instances that test your nerves and check how calmly you can manage situations. You should not get paranoid and let the situation take you on a royal ride. On the other hand, take control of the situation and lead from the front. Ups and downs are parts and parcel of any business and one got to deal with it quite maturely. Throwing tantrums may not be the solution. Complaining about things may again not be the viable option but taking complete charge of the matter may take you out of troubled waters.

Patience is required the most when it comes to businesses that are volatile in nature and are mostly dependent on market forces. So if anything goes awry in the market it may have a lasting impact on the business as well. This means that you got to keep your nerves cool and face the situation as it comes. Construction industry a matter fact is one such industry that is known for its volatility and is easily affected by the market forces. Since you do not have any control on the market, you just have to move with the flow. The one thing that you need to take notice is of picking the right things while you move on. When things are tough, you better lie low. This is where patience comes into picture. You may be quite an aggressive person when it comes to business but at times you need to replace your aggression with calmness as it does not do well at all times.

Being aggressive in an industry like construction is often considered as a virtue and not many can maintain the same aggression throughout. They often tend to be aggressive in the beginning but in the mid they begin losing it. This is in no way a positive sign for a construction company. Similarly, when there is high unpredictability you got to give upon on your aggressiveness as well and try to remain patient till you see the right time to hit back.

There have been numerous instances of many huge construction companies going bankrupt as they maintained their aggressive policy when it was time to remain calm. They were of the opinion that they can’t shed away the natural instinct of the company which was indeed the primary reason of their debacle. They could have stayed down for a while and waited for the right moment. They severely lacked patience. It is somewhat difficult to stay afloat in turbulent waters but once you manage to take the right decision during wrong times, things becomes smooth once the phase gets over.

Rent heavy equipment after carefully deliberating the pros and cons

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It is pretty obvious that you do not want to keep your construction equipment lying idle and want to make some use of it. In case, you are running out of projects and do not have much work to put all your machines to some use, you might consider to rent them. But by just renting the machine can’t ensure that you do not have to worry about it any longer. No wonder that you can start getting rental money on each and every month but there is something you are losing in this bargain. Well, you are definitely not losing your equipment but if you hand it over to the wrong chap, then you will without doubt get scrap in return at the end of the rental term.

It is therefore very crucial to identify the pros and cons of renting the machine before you actually go for the deal. Knowing the benefits and the disadvantages can help you a long way in taking a concrete decision on how you should be going ahead with the deal. If you have been renting machines in the past, then you would be knowing about how to deal with situations but if you are a newbie, then you got to learn things first before you go to strike a deal.

Identify the heavy equipment you want to let out:-

It is very critical to first identify the heavy equipment that you want to put on rent. You may not want to give a new one on rent as you may want that for your projects. You can play around with the older stuffs that you have. Check your inventories, know what you have and rent the machine that are not being used by you any longer. Do not let out the new equipment if you have any and especially not the ones that you feel are doing great guns in your company. You should pick out the ones that are lying idle for long, the ones that are not technologically advanced and are probably a little out of date.

Renting heavy equipment has high possibility of it getting worn out before than ever:-

If you have decided to let out your heavy equipment, you should also be ready to acknowledge the fact that you will not get it back the way you gave it to the taker. When you rent your heavy equipment, the user uses it exclusively to complete his projects on time and he may use the machine the way he wants without paying much attention to the wants of the machine. This may end up in deteriorating the quality of the machine and at the end of the rental period you will find the machine to be in a bad state. You may also have to spend lot of money in getting it repaired so that you can probably rent it again or just sell it to another person.

Therefore, do not spend all that you have made from the rental income. Save some money to get the stuff repaired.

Selling heavy equipment that are on the verge of becoming obsolete

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Heavy equipment being so expensive, we use them to the fullest and then when we see no further use we try to sell it off to someone who may need it in his business. But as years passes by, we see a lot of changes in the technology of a machine and people ideally do not wish to buy something that is very old. They like to go with heavy equipment that are known to the operators and they do not experience a hard time to work on it. Now in a situation like this, if you have a machine that has been with you for decades and now it just can’t be used at all, you are perhaps left with no other option than to sell it as scrap. A person with a sane mind will never buy it with the intention of using it in his construction business. It will simply not work.

In case, you sell the heavy equipment as scrap, you are not getting anything out of it. Just few hundred dollars and you are done. But what if a company is ready to pay few thousand dollars for the same piece of metal. It sound to be unrealistic but as a matter of fact there are some companies that deal with age old heavy equipment and buy them by paying decent amount of money which a person selling it can’t even expect to get for that old stuff. These companies are always in the hunt of old heavy equipment that people are happily willing to do away with.

The modus operandi of these companies is to buy the machines at real cheap rate and change their parts with newer ones. They work to give it an altogether new look and also installs gadgets that are currently in demand. Overall, they make it look like a brand new heavy equipment and sell it at a price much less than the ones that you normally buy from the heavy equipment manufacturing companies. These companies have engineers working for them. These engineers have loads of experience in producing heavy equipments. They are also provided with all the equipments that are required to manufacture construction machines. It is just that they can’t use the name of the brand on the machines or else they mostly produce machines which are a bit less than par to the original ones.

It makes a lot of sense to sell old heavy equipment to these companies. They are ready to buy machines that are not bought by anybody. So before you plan to sell it off to such companies, it is better that you first check the number of such companies available in your city. You can contact them and check the price they are ready to pay. Do not commit to anybody but speak with as many people as you can and know the price they are ready to pay you. You can then sell the machine to the person who can pay you the most. In this way, you can get rid of very old heavy equipment and can still make decent money from it.

Lien property that your heavy equipment was on

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There is always a danger that you will not be paid for your work from the person for whom you are working. This can result in huge loss for your company as you have to pay the dues to your employees which is quite obviously not going to be a meager amount and if you are unable to collect the money from the guy for whom you have been working then that will lead to big problem for you as well as for your company. In order to avoid this loss, you can place a lien on the property that your heavy equipment was on. Placing a lien will ensure that you have the right to dispose of the property after the completion of work to any third party if you are not paid for your work. In case you dispose it off, you will be able to get your dues paid and in turn you can even pay the dues of your employees that is liable on you.

We would be discussing the reasons on which you can place a lien on the property your heavy equipment have been working.

Being paid slowly or not in time:-

This is one of the indication where you should act and act fast in placing a lien on the property. If you paid fairly slow or are paid not in time, it only indicates that the person is either not interested to pay you the entire sum and is paying you a bit so that you continue with the work and once it is done he can just shrug off the responsibility to pay the entire sum of the work. Many small construction companies have suffered huge losses as they failed to put a lien on the property and it finally resulted in non-payment of their dues. You not have much to do later once you are done with your work. You have to get off the place with your machine as you have to take care of other businesses as well.

The project giver disputing your work time and again:-

This is another usual instance that many construction companies experiences in their career span. The person for whom they are working will come out with very lame and silly reasons and will make a huge mole of a mountain. You may not know if they are doing it so that they do not have to pay you the promised sum or are they genuinely unhappy with your work. It is recommended that you take their feedback and work as per their needs but if they still complain and threats not to pay you, putting a lien on their property should be the next step you should take to protect your rights.

Small contractors not getting paid by the project owner:-

At times small contractors who do not own the project directly and work for somebody else are also at risk of not getting paid by the project owner. They can also place a lien on the property and ensure that they are paid in full for their work.

 

Heavy equipment crashes

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Heavy equipment crashes has claimed many lives and we are yet to do something concrete about this. These sorts of crashes happen more often in small construction sites where the work is in charge of small time contractors who are not interested in spending any money in buying modern heavy equipment nor want to recruit competent heavy equipment operators. These crashes are somewhat taints the overall picture of the construction industry.

On one hand, people consider this business as one of the most profitable business and on the other hand, it is also being frowned at due to sheer negligence on the part of the contractors and other co-workers. Some accidents happen due to poor quality of heavy equipment, some happen due to experienced men working on the machine and some happen due to negligence adopted by people working on the jobsite. Overall, the ultimate sufferers are the men who work in such a risky environment and are prone to become victim of such a fatal crash.

One such crash happened with an earth moving excavator which was working next to a pond mistakenly went inside it and got submerged in it. The operator died in this incident. These types of crashes have become quite common but this can’t be used as an excuse. There is a human life that is getting lost in this process and it is high time that people start taking such crashes very seriously and also take preventive actions to avoid them in the future. Incidents like workers getting crushed to death have also come to the forefront. The pattern of accidents may not be common but the incidents are becoming rampant and the need of the hour is to ensure that mechanisms are put in place to curb such accidents and if at all they occur then there should be enough resources to tackle the problem and get the man out of the death trap.

Some learning that we can take from such accidents is to refrain from recruiting incompetent operators. They can post direct threat to their lives as well as to the life of others. Hiring inexperienced operators is still manageable as he can be given the right kind of training and can be used as a useful resource. You can figure out a competent and an incompetent operator from his attributes and his attitude towards work. This should give you a clear indication whom you should keep and whom should you fire.

Also make sure that you do not give lot of stress to the operator. Let him work in a comfortable environment. He is bound to make mistakes if he is under any sort of stress and any small error on his part can cost you dearly. While the heavy equipment is on a roll, clear instruction should be given to other workers to not work around it. They can move to a different place or do something else but not to wander around the machine. Following these steps can only minimize the incidents of heavy equipment crashes and bring down the figures of death toll on the jobsites.

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Biggest heavy equipment in the world

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Heavy equipment companies have manufactured and are also in the process of manufacturing bigger heavy equipment. The bigger the machines they are able to build, the more they get the recognition in the world of construction and mining. In order to get the work done faster, you either need more number of heavy equipment to do the work for you or you need one big giant machine that can take into account the work of all the machines put together. This one big machine may even take less than a day to dig up a place that is equal to the size of a football field. So big machines not only mean getting the work done sooner and employ lesser machines for the job. It also means doing the work with accuracy and maintaining the level of quality at any given point of time.

We will first be talking about a German made bucket-wheel excavator that perhaps does not look or sound anything close to an excavator. It is been christened as Bagger 288. The weight of this machine is around 13,500 tons and was built to excavate coal from a German coal mine. Right from day one, it seems that Bagger 288 is able to excavate around 240,000 tons of coal on a daily basis. This is simply phenomenal because if we compare it to something that we can comprehend, it means that it can dig up to 30 meter of a football field. As a matter of fact, the coal that is excavates on a single day can fill up around 2400 coal wagons. Speaking a bit about the excavator, it is up to 220 meter long and 96 meter high. The amount of electricity it requires externally is 16.56 megawatts and has a travel speed of 2-10 meter per minute. The minimum turning radius of the excavator is 100 meters and has an inclination of 1:18.

The Bagger 288 has 18 buckets installed in it which gives it the potential to hold around 6.6 cubic meters or overburden. However, the most difficult part is when the machine needs to be moved to some other place. It seems that it takes more time and money to dismantle the machine and take it piece by piece. On the other hand, they prefer porting the machine in one single piece. It has been agreed that utmost care needs to be taken to move the machine from one location to another. This also requires good number of skilled men who can ensure that while the machine is being ported, it does not damage the eco-system around it.

This seems to be an engineering marvel as it is even difficult to imagine something as huge as Bagger 288. Today, we also have an updated version of Bagger 288 which is Bagger 293 which weighs around 14,200 tons. Machines of this stature are one in million and the cost of producing such a piece is overtly expensive and also consumes a lot of time. So as long as heavy equipment companies do not get an order to produce something like this, they prefer to keep producing the conventional machines.

Rent a Cat heavy construction equipment from me

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Renting heavy construction equipment has never been as simple as it is in today’s time. Earlier when there was no internet and when people had to hunt for machines on rent, they were largely dependent on newspaper advertisements or classifieds that gets published in some magazines that is based on construction equipment or equipment salesman. Another mean to know if someone is renting a machine is through a person from their circle. Other than this, they were hardly any means to know if anybody is renting heavy construction equipment. Things have however changed for better now and with the advent of internet we are get what we want at a faster rate and we can also expect to get something better through internet. Nowadays, brand matters a lot and someone who is letting out branded items are invariably everyone’s choice.

We have Equipment Company that is in the business of renting branded heavy equipment and one can indeed vouch for what they have to offer to the construction companies. They are in the business of heavy equipment for the last 20 years which makes them one of the most experienced in the lot. Experience does matter and when it matters it matters a lot. So a company with over 20 years of experience will suggest you machines based on your needs. If needed they will do an overview study of your project and try to understand what kind of heavy equipment will best suit your project. This will help them to give you better suggestions and this is what they have been doing since long.

You can vouch on them on any kind of heavy construction equipment. Right from a dozer to an excavator to scraper or a grader, all you have to do is name the equipment you are looking for to take on rent and you will get that at a better price; a price that you will not get at many places. So here you can get some real good branded machine at an affordable price. All you have to do is check their website and see the machines. In case, you need to speak to someone to get a better picture about the services you get from them, then you can get the number of the person and call them up to get all your questions answered.  817-733-3799