Selecting Construction Equipment

By Author: Lucy Carter
Total Articles: 100
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Equipment is a key part of the construction industry, especially in the heavy and highway sectors where it often represents companies' greatest long-term capital investment. Heavy, highway and utilities jobs may require significant excavation work, grading, aggregate production, embankment construction and mass concrete construction, all of which involve sizable, heavy and quite costly pieces of construction machinery. Construction companies must consider the issues of purchasing, leasing, depreciation, maintenance, repair and replacement when planning financially for such large capital investments. The construction equipment choices they make dictate how long a job will take, what method will be used to carry it out, and how much it will cost.

The primary goal of successful management of construction projects is to meet the requirements of the plans and specifications within the defined time limits as inexpensively as possible. One of the keys to achieving this is to manage time, cost and quality by selecting the appropriate machinery for the job. In order to determine what equipment is best for the job at hand, ...
... the type and amount of work to be performed must be known, as well as the production rates and costs of the available types of equipment. The type and amount of work to be done are defined by the contract documentation, as well as the condition and location of the job site. Construction equipment capability information can be found in the equipment specifications, while the cost must be determined according to whether it is owned, leased or rented and what it will cost to operate, maintain and repair it.

All construction equipment is made to handle or process material. The material may be rock, undisturbed earth, cement, aggregate, water, structural steel or a combination of these. The job may require loosening, loading, hauling, dumping, crushing, removal, spreading, shaping, compacting, mixing, curing, hoisting or any number of handling or processing tasks. According to the job at hand one must select the appropriate type of machine capable of carrying it out.

Manufacturers publish specifications that explain the capabilities of their equipment.

This information includes, for instance, the payloads of haulers, the weights of pile hammers, the tipping loads of front-end loaders and the digging depths of excavators. They also provide information required to figure out the production rates of the equipment, including the travel speeds of trucks and tractors, the maximum capacities of pumps and belt conveyors, and the volumes of concrete mixer drums.
Oliver Newton is the owner of Priority Plant, a leading supplier of construction machinery in the UK.