Excavators are essential towards most construction projects that depend on excavating elements and material mobilization to be completed. Often these machines known as diggers or excavators are applied to various kinds of tasks or projects such as landscaping, demolition, mining projects, building construction and even river dredging. The standard excavator or the general components of an excavator consists of a boom, a dipper or arm and a bucket that are connected to a control centre often referred to as the cab which is attached to a rotating platform.

These rotating platforms are usually capable of rotating a full 360 degrees. In general, these machines are mobile either on tracks or on rubber wheels depending on the requirement of the project and naturally the manufacturer’s target customer. Excavators come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes with some weighing up to 200,000 lbs. on the high end and about 15 tons for the mini excavator hire industry.

These days, excavators come with a series of external interchangeable attachments that enable these machines a wide range of tasks that were traditionally done by other tools. These hydraulic attachments usually replace the digging bucket (swapping) with augers, drills, rippers or rakes that allow the excavator to be assigned to other tasks.

This is the main reason as to why, it is critical for project managers to have a better understanding of an excavator as it would enable them to choose the right type of Excavator for the right type of job when the decide to purchase or hire excavators.

The first step that a project manager needs to take in order for him or her to choose an excavator for hire/ rental is to identify the needs of the project and make an assessment on what it is exactly that the machine is required to accomplish during the project timeline.

For instance, the right excavator size is epitome to the project, and then comes the type of attachments that will be needed eventually before deciding on the duration of the excavator rental in order to ensure project efficiency.

Types of Excavators

In general, and the standard task of an excavator is to move earth, however due to the advancements in technology the different sizes and hydraulic attachments that are available for these machines make them versatile enough to be used for almost any task ranging from a simple landscaping project for a small lawn to building a high-rise skyscraper or a mega shopping mall.

As the variation of size are associated with the size of projects relatively, mobility of excavators depend on surface (wheeled excavators or chain/ crawlers) as wheeled excavators are preferred in urban areas as they are gentler on roads and pavement compared to the robust metal tracks.

There are also cabled excavators in contrast to the hydraulic excavator which use a set of robust steel wires linked to cables that move the main components of the excavators as opposed to the hydraulic excavators which trigger movements using hydraulic fluid.