Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Burning fuel and pushing some dirt around

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.)

No comments: