The digitization in machinery has greatly influenced the construction empire with improved productivity and new structuring techniques. From home building to large-scale projects, every construction site has a powerful set of earth-moving and load-handling tools to get the job done easily and effectively. Given heavy equipment requires serious and professional handling, whoever works in the field must completely and carefully understand the task-specific uses of every equipment tool to ensure safety, efficiency and quality in the overall building operation.
If you are entering a construction-related job, might as well equip yourself with basic knowledge and familiarity with the most commonly-used equipment in a large-scale commercial and civil construction work environment. These essential tools are categorized into four groups according to their functionality:
The Lifters
A lifting equipment refers to any machine that is commercially used for moving extremely heavy materials from one place to another. This powerful equipment includes a wide variety of cranes, conveyors, forklifts and hoists.
Mobile cranes, high as buildings, are the first thing we notice in a large-scale construction site. These are designed to raise, lower or move heavy objects horizontally. Conveyors and forklifts, on the other hand, perform the same functionality through transport of heavy materials in bulk. Hoists are another lifting equipment that are considered as labourer’s best friend for making their workplace strain-free.
The Diggers
Every large-scale project requires a strong foundation to hold the entire structure in place in the midst of a natural disaster. That’s where earth-moving equipment finds their purpose. The family of diggers includes excavators, bulldozers, backhoes, loaders and scrapers. Through any type of soil or stone, one way or another, these tools are capable of excavating on all depths of terrain surfaces. That said, diggers make a perfect machinery for commercial or residential sites with underground levels specifically designed for parking lots or storage space.
The Makers
Also known as the construction equipment, this family is involved in the overall creation and finish of essential concrete materials such as rocks, cement and asphalt. The construction equipment includes concrete mixtures, compactors and pavers.
Among these must-haves, the concrete mixture is the most essential machine for projects of any size and depth. A concrete mixture combines cement evenly in order to form aggravates or the combination of sand, gravel and water into concrete.
Compactors and pavers may work very similarly in finishing touches of base layers. In large-scale construction sites, the compactors are used to crush rocks into base layers, foundations or slabs. Whereas pavers are mostly used in roadway projects for laying and finishing touches on asphalt.
The Drillers
Drilling tools such as road headers and tunnel boring machines or TBM are commonly found in roadway and tunneling projects. Both devices are advanced in rock cutting and deep excavation, only that TBMs are used for drilling longer tunnels and other more complex geological projects.
The Transporters
From horses to big trucks, transportation has played an essential part in the construction business. Trucks are the main transport equipment used for carrying all the necessary materials to and off the construction site in a timely manner. The transporters are capable of carrying large quantities and various types of materials including water, mixed concrete and other heavy objects.
In place of onsite mixers, concrete truck mixers are more considered in large-scale projects for faster filling of ready-mixed concrete materials. However, the concrete must be discharged from a truck mixer within two hours to prevent the cement from hardening or drying up.
