Continuing our theme of playing with dirt, in this post we consider the bulldozer.
On my recent trip to the NSW north coast, I encountered a few long stretches of roadwork. I don't think I've ever seen so much earthmoving equipment in my life.
Graders, excavators, scrapers, off-highway trucks and dozers made up most of the equipment. And there was some big stuff in there, including not of few of the larger CAT dozers: the D9 and D10.
The D10 is over 66 tonnes of machine muscle married to a 1204 litre fuel tank. The price of diesel at the moment is around $1.80 per litre, so when you fill up for a weekend drive, you're looking at nearly $2200.00. The D10 burns through that diesel at a leisurely 75 litres per hour ($135.00) - even the Falcon wagon I used to drive wasn't that thirsty.
Of course, if you had a cool $1,000,000.00 floating around to buy a D10 in the first place, a little loose change on fuel probably doesn't worry you too much.
This is all a long way from the first bulldozer which made its humble appearance back in 1923. James Cummings, a young farmer, and J. Earl McLeod designed and made the first dozer out of the frame of a Model T Ford, some windmill springs and other assorted bits. Its first application was backfilling a pipeline trench.
Simple concept: a blade pushing dirt. Add time, money and market demand and you've got a monster which is near unstoppable. (And the ultimate boy's toy as well, as our friends at Tonka would testify.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment