Must-Have Heavy Equipment for Quarries
What equipment should be found in every quarry?
- Bulldozers
- Wheel Loaders
- Crushers
- Off-highway trucks
Heavy equipment is used in a wide range of different applications—one of their most common uses is for quarry work. Quarries are places near mountains, valleys, or basically anywhere where stone and rock and other raw materials from the earth are extracted. Aside from the aforementioned, other materials that are usually collected include limestone, granite, sand, and other crystals.
This means that the equipment needed for quarries have to be extremely strong. They should be strong enough to literally tear up the ground and extract large amounts of earth.
Power, strength, and durability—that’s what you have to look for in heavy equipment for quarries. Keep in mind that not all the strongest and powerful equipment are made for quarry work. In fact, a lot of quarrying companies prefer very specific machines for their work.
Some of the most important of them include the following:
Bulldozers
The first part of the quarrying process is usually the hardest. In this phase, the material between the surface and the minerals or materials that you’re supposed to extract are removed by using explosives or large-scale bulldozers and crawler tractors.
More often than not, giant bulldozers are what many companies prefer. After an initial explosion to loosen up the earth, these machines with their giant front-mounted blades move large amounts of dirt away and force themselves to rip through the earth.
That said, the primary work of bulldozers is to move loosened land away from the main quarrying area. They make space for most other machines to be able to do their work, or for another round of explosives to be detonated in the area.
Wheel Loaders
Somewhat similar to bulldozers, but different in functionality, wheel loaders are machines that are equipped with a powerful hydraulic arm that has a bucket at the end. If bulldozers are used to move dirt away from the quarry, wheel loaders are used to carry the gathered land onto loading trucks.
They’re also used to load mined products into rock trucks which will then transport the product into processing plants.
In essence, wheel loaders are used only to load up either the collected soil or the mined minerals and materials onto their specific trucks.
Keep in mind that material handling is incredibly important for quarries. If their functions are delayed or at the tiniest bit slowed, materials will begin to pile up too much in such a way that it’s possible for the entire operation to stop just to get rid of all the raw materials waiting in the wings.
Crushers
These machines are arguably one of the most important pieces of equipment that should be found in a quarry. The act of incredibly important, especially if there’s a need to process the larger rocks into smaller, more manageable materials. This way, all the raw material will be easier to handle, easier to transfer from place to place, and overall, easier to work with.
Crushers are powerful machines that have an elaborate system of jaws, vibrators, and steel plates that crush material from the quarry. The whole crushing process will result in raw materials in the desired quality. they could be crushed into fine or coarse ones, depending on how you crush them.
You can choose between a mobile crusher or a stationary crusher for quarrying jobs. Most of the time, their only difference is that mobile crushers can be moved from one place to another, while the stationary crusher can’t be. It would take a lot of hard work and time for it to transfer locations.
That being said, if you plan on quickly moving from one quarry to another, a compact mobile crusher such as those provide by Rubble Master will be your most efficient choice.
Rock Trucks
When it comes to quarry work, your typical truck won’t cut it. Trucks you see on the highway or in urban areas are too weak. For these types of heavy-duty work, Off-Highway trucks or rock trucks are preferred. These massive trucks are used to haul everything that needs to leave the quarry—be it overburden or the extracted materials.
These trucks usually have 3,500 horsepower engines and have incredible hauling capacities.
When it comes to material transport in quarries, rock trucks are the only option.
Key Takeaway
Working a quarry is no joke. It will take hardy people and even hardier equipment. Since your main goal is to dig into the earth itself for specific materials, you will need machines that are perfectly designed to do so. From bulldozers to wheel loaders, from crushers to giant rock trucks, all of these pieces of equipment are vital in keeping quarries working.
