Excavators

Excavators are special construction machines used to dig out and refill earth excavations. One differentiates, depending on the type, between discontinuous excavators for loading, transporting and offloading (shovel, flat excavator, suction dredger) and excavators for continuous operation (bucket wheel excavator, chain-and-bucket excavator).

Excavators travel either on wheels (mobile excavators with 4-wheel drive) or on chain tracks. Walking draglines walk by means of an arm and a pair of wheels. Mini excavators weigh from 1 t to 6 t. The biggest excavators are used in open cast mining. The chain-and-bucket excavator in Garzweiler, weighing approximately 13.000 t and measuring almost 100 m in height, is currently the world's largest of its kind.

The quality of the tracks, chains, idlers wheels, drive sprockets and track shoes on crawler type excavators is of eminent importance in avoiding high follow-on costs. In other words, spare parts should also always be of the highest quality (e.g. BERCO).

Source: www.wikipedia.de