Bull Dozer Rentals

Uses for Dozers

Bulldozers can be found on large and small scale construction sites, mines, roadsides, military bases, heavy industry factories, and large governmental projects.

The bulldozer's primary tools are the blade and the ripper.

Most often, bulldozers are large and powerful tracked engineering vehicles. The tracks give them excellent ground hold and mobility through very rough terrain. Wide tracks help distribute the bulldozer's weight over large area (decreasing pressure), thus preventing it from sinking in sandy or muddy ground.

Extra wide tracks are known as 'swamp tracks'. Bulldozers have excellent ground hold and a torque divider designed to convert the engine's power into dragging ability , letting the bulldozer use its own weight to push very heavy things and remove obstacles that are stuck in the ground.

The Caterpillar D9, for example, can easily tow tanks that weigh more than 70 tons. Because of these attributes, bulldozers are used to clear areas of obstacles, shrubbery, burnt vehicles, and remains of structures.

Sometimes a bulldozer is used to push another piece of earthmoving equipment known as a "scraper". The towed Fresno Scraper, invented in 1883 by James Porteous, was the first design to enable this to be done economically, removing the soil from the cut and depositing it elsewhere on shallow ground (fill).

Many dozer blades have a reinforced center section with this purpose in mind, and are called "bull blades."

Bulldozers have been further modified over time to evolve into new machines which are capable of working in ways that the original bulldozer can not.

One example is that loader tractors were created by removing the blade and substituting a large volume bucket and hydraulic arms which can raise and lower the bucket, thus making it useful for scooping up earth and loading it into trucks.

Other modifications to the original bulldozer include making it smaller to let it operate in small work areas where movement is limited, such as in mining. A very small bulldozer is sometimes called a calfdozer: see the image at this link and this link.

Nevertheless, the original earthmoving bulldozers are still irreplaceable as their tasks are concentrated in deforestation, earthmoving, ground leveling, and road carving.

The heavy bulldozers are mainly employed to level the terrain to make it fit to construct on. The construction, however, is mainly done by small bulldozers and loader tractors.

Tracked Loaders (also known as Crawler Loaders) are sometimes incorrectly referred to as bulldozers because of the similarity in design