Dozers and crawler tractors have many things in common. In fact, crawler tractors with blades designed for pushing on the front are often called bulldozers. But dozers are usually larger and are designed just for earth and material moving, while many crawler tractors can be used for a variety of purposes by changing the blade attachment to things like buckets, forks or other pieces of equipment.

Dozers are designed to do one thing and that's move earth by pushing it. Unlike bucket tractors that scoop earth and lift it in a bucket to move it from place to place, dozers merely push what they want to move. The blade on front is slightly curved to make the movement easier. The blade isn't designed to lift the materials but only push it forward and out of the way.

The blades on dozers are curved from top to bottom and differ from the blades on things like snow plows that are curved to the side. Snow plow blades are designed to scrape and then funnel the snow to the edge. The blades on dozers are curved in such a way that the materials don't funnel to the side, but instead keep sliding back down the blade to avoid spilling over the top of it. This keeps the dirt or other materials in front of the blade and allows it to be pushed straight ahead.

Dozers, like crawler tractors, run on tracks rather than wheels. This makes them the ideal earth-moving equipment in many different situations. Construction and earth-moving equipment with tracks do less damage to the ground that they run over. In a muddy situation, for instance, a piece of heavy equipment on wheels is going to sink at least a little at the points where the tires touch the ground. Because tracks distribute the weight more evenly from the front to the back of the equipment, there will be less sinking, rutting and gouging. This holds true in situations where there's no mud, but very loose dirt as is usually found at most construction sites. Less gouging and rutting means safer, smoother operation of the other types of equipment that are on wheels.

Dozers with tracks also can be used in situations where using wheeled vehicles might be impractical. Very rocky terrain, uneven, slightly graded or rough terrain could prove dangerous for equipment on wheels. But dozers, because of their tracks, get excellent traction and are much less prone to tipping because their weight is distributed evenly along the length of the tracks. And because tracks essentially have dozens of treads and points of contact at one time instead of just a few that tires have, they can handle things like snow, ice, mud and loose soil much better. Work could go on somewhere with those issues with dozers when it would have to stop with other types of equipment.

Overall, a dozer is most useful when you simply need earth or other materials pushed, and you have other equipment like bucket tractors to lift the dirt to put it in a dump truck or take it to a fill area.

Photo Credits: Dafydd359

Originally posted 2010-04-12 03:45:56. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Green Construction, Tools and Equipment

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blade, buckets, bulldozers, construction sites, crawler tractors, dozers, earth moving equipment, heavy equipment, loose dirt, snow plow blades, snow plows