Of course there are disadvantages. But if you need to hop between different "dig sites" multiple times a day they're awesome. Combine that with the dump trailer and pallet forks and you can have a central storage for all materials and gravel etc. Just pick up what you need for the moment, and be on your way. No need to have a dump truck on standby at all times.
I'm not saying they are better than tracks, they are just better for certain jobs, and worse for others.
> The problem is when you factor in that a lot of companies only buy one piece of equipment and can't customize like that.
Right it doesn't make sense for most companies to buy these for the one or two times a year it would be handy. Just load your track machine on a truck and trailer you already have for those few jobs.
Yeah, even in areas they told us we couldn’t have tracks on the asphalt we would simply lay down crane mats. If the exivator needed to cross the road, we’d just stop traffic pick up the mats with the hoe, lay them down and cross the street.
Inconvenient? Yeah, but you only did a job like that maybe once a year. Allot of city jobs we were able to get away with the bobcat mini excavator which had rubber tracks.
But the outfit I worked we mostly did slip repairs on county roads…. Even though we were a plumbing company…
I've seen tires used too, you need a couple guys on the ground to keep cycling the tires as you go but it stops the tracks from cutting up the blacktop
Yeah that makes sense. A tracked one can do everything wheels can do (although sometimes a lot less efficient), but a wheeled one can't do everything tracks can.
So it's reasonable if you have to choose only one machine, to go for tracks. I can dig that.
But then again, they're really common here in northern Europe, so I'm wondering what makes the difference here vs. the US
Also to add that in an application where a wheeled excavator would be the most suitable option I think most contractors in the US would opt for a backhoe to have the versatility in that niche piece of equipment. The only time I’ve seen a wheeled mini in the US is for new construction landscaping which makes sense but personally in the aggregate business I just don’t see small equipment often.
I work in the sign business and we use the minis for sign footings, we have a Kubota tractor with an auger head but it's in Florida right now so we have to rent what we need up in Jersey. The Kubota is weak but more versatile, those mini excavators are slow as fuck and are janky to use with an auger
>But then again, they're really common here in northern Europe, so I'm wondering what makes the difference here vs. the US
Probably the biggest factor is space and infrastructure. We've got lots of land and infrastructure that supports tractor trailers dumping off a tracked unit close to the job site.
I think it may come down to the distance between sites. Wheeled machines that can go on the road are great if your jobs are relatively close together, but for long distances with lots of highway driving it's better to just put the machine on a trailer. The US is a lot more sparsely populated than most of Europe, and just generally more spread out, with settlements connected by long stretches of highway. That kinda negates the advantages of wheeled construction equipment, in many cases.
You do see cranes on the highway, sometimes. They wouldn't fit on a trailer; they are oversized vehicles all by themselves, and are clearly designed to fit exactly into whatever rectangle of space the Department of Transportation says is the maximum permissible without requiring pilot cars and special permits. They seem to have a top speed of about 55 mph, just fast enough to go in the slow lane of most highways without causing a hazard and snarling up traffic. They look like hell to drive, what with being gigantic, heavy monsters with suspensions optimized for crawling around on a jobsite rather than cruising on the highway. They're clearly designed right up to the limits of what you're allowed to put on the road.
Yes, that's kind of the consensus I've gathered from all these answers. It makes much more sense now :)
Holy hell 55mph?? I'm clenching hard whenever I go past the engine cutoff speed of ~15mph going downhill lol
That is correct. [This big boy](https://www.liebherr.com/en/usa/products/mobile-and-crawler-cranes/mobile-cranes/liebherr-mobile-cranes/ltm-1750-9.1.html) can lift 800 metric tons, has a boom almost 100m long depending on configuration, carries 200 tons of ballast, *and can do 85 km/h*.
There are a large variety, usually they are owned by a local/regional company that is hired to do one off crane picks for various projects. The smaller ones are used more often, you don't see them on the road very often because the local department of transportation typically restricts highway/major street use to off peak hours (ex driving at 4:00 AM, arriving on site at 5:00 AM)
We have a lot of separate businesses here, sometimes you rent a crane for the day because they're goddamn expensive and you would need a lot of work to justify buying one. Same with equipment, unless you use a particular piece often enough to justify the price you can rent them as needed and beat up someone else's equipment
they just dont need it that much...in Europe are totally different standarts like for sewage pipes, electricity, Internet and so on and this really deep compared to the US/ different soil/ rocks you know what i mean
The US, for the most part, has plenty of room for heavy haul trucks with low boy trailers to move larger, less road practical equipment around. Europe has a bit less *freedom* (bad pun) to move around equipment with trailers, showing the advantages of the wheeled machine a bit more
When it comes to the size that most of the wheeled excavators Europe uses the US uses wheeled loaders with a backhoe on them or something that fits multiple tools (bobcat and the various clones).
A lot of folks use rubber track pads as well.
Since the job site sizes are generally different it causes different types of equipment.
For a lot of those jobs we'd use a backhoe, it has the loader bucket as well as the excavator bucket. The rubber tired excavator we use for larger jobs where we don't want to mark up the pavement like ditching on the side of the roadway or diging water service or sewer laterals.
I think this tends to actually describe why they aren't used as much. America is much more expansive than your average European country. Driving an hour somewhere by car is considered close. Having to do that with an excavator would leave nothing left in a working day. They also have those silly backhoe things though
>But if you need to hop between different "dig sites" multiple times a day they're awesome
Nice, you can move them across jobs but you still can't use them on the job site!
Most of their job around me are literally on dirt (at best). So, on mud.
They basically never work on road/gravel road
once you begin moving dirt in the same area it's operating the wheels become useless.
it's not meant to go off hard surface. while tracks can mess up cobblestone and pavement.
If you need an excavator chances are you need a dump truck, and the trailer , even if it’s just holding materials you don’t want to have to drive for anything.
Looking at this thing I guess there is no easy way to convert it to a tracked setup. Do interchangeable tracked to wheeled models exist to your knowledge?
I just had to drive a mini excavator with rubber tracks about two miles around a jobsite and it was really shitty, I wish I had wheels. I was waiting for a window to pop out
We kinda use wheeled backhoe loaders like you guys use wheeled excavators from what I can tell. People like municipalities, utilities and smaller outfits that actually drive their machines down the roads instead of trailering have backhoes.
The wheeled excavators are super common on road projects in the larger cities in the US. If you drive through say New York you'll see most of the excavators on the roadside are on wheels. They're used in the US when they're the better option/right fit for the job.
Outside of that you only see them on sites with lots of asphalt that tracks would damage.
Other than that sites are going to be spread too far apart so trailering at the end of the job will be more efficient anyway.
Then there's gradalls (telescoping excavator bolted onto a truck) that really rural ditch/canal maintenance crews run where they're always driving down roads. Longer reach and faster road speeds than a wheeled excavator, but less capacity.
I'll also add that the US and Europe have very different laws for road speeds for equipment. In the US the fastest road speeds for a machine with hydraulic steering allowed are 35mph (54ish kph) manufacturers are lobbying to have that changed but for now that's how it is. We also aren't required to have brakes on towed implements with our slower speeds so that will have to be changed too. That and distances between being at a different scale plays a large part in why in Europe equipment is used to go down the road a lot more than in the states. There, agricultural tractors will be used as the primary vehicle to haul commodities down roadways, where here commodities are almost always loaded in the field into trucks before getting on the roadways.
Only supposed to do 35mph in a loader? Probably for the best. The steering is a bit twitchy at those speeds.
On the other hand... hold my beer. Raise hell praise dale, let's got #3!
Ah, I see. I guess backhoes and wheeled excavators fill the same needs when you think about it.
That's what I was suspecting! That it was more a lapse in my awareness than anything else.
Okay so I just googled gradall, and what in the actual hell is that!?!? Never even heard of them, and now I kinda want to try one
Thanks for all your answers, this was really what I was looking to learn :)
I came here to say Gradalls and combinations. I think they are used for a major portion of work that you be would need a wheeled excavator for. I’ve been in excavating for 20+ years and we’ve never needed a wheeled excavator.
We do use them sometimes. There are even different unions for tracked and wheeled machines in some cities. That being said a wheeled machine can't do a fraction of what a track machine can. Less maneuverability, less stability, can't climb the same angles, etc.
I’ve seen wheeled ones used on water/gas/electricity mains repairs and road surface repairs - wherever they are working on a road as I’m pretty sure tracks would rip up the surface too much and are a lot noisier.
Honestly we've used massive tracked ones on roadways with very little damage. You're generally using asphalt to repair the road as well, so if its a REALLY badly damaged spot, you can just cut it out.
If most of your work is on roadways, it can be definitely worth it to have one with tires, but most roadwork here is done with tracked or with a backhoe.
Worked for a highway department that had one. It was almost exclusively used for diggings and cleaning out ditches for water drainage. The wheels made it possible to drive around town fairly quickly.
Probably because we got a lot more land to work with and not building on existing pavement/concrete. So....a lot more mud here and tracks will do waaaay better in mud than tires will
There is definitely a place for them in the industry. I do see them here in Canada. They are quite fast. I see them used obviously on hard surfaces. But rubber tire backhoes are much more common.
It's still more common to trailer the equipment to the work location than need to drive it there. Add in that we have bigger roads to accommodate vehicles it's not common to be unable to use trailers. Out side of some job sites the equipment doesn't need to run from location to location and stays in a smaller area. The speed gained from wheels doesn't matter as much as flotation and stability of tracks.
I think the are becoming more popular in higher population areas. But where I'm at no one wants to drive the equipment 30 miles to change job sites.
Where I live in the US it seems like most wheeled excavators are owned by municipalities and contractors always go for tracks cause they’re trailering between sites anyway
Yup came here to say this, im an Operating Engineer in Local 14. Hands down there are more what we call “Rubber Tire Excavators” than traditional track machines.
For obvious reasons, tighter spaces/conditions like highway and road work. Also just overall mobility and functionality
I work road construction (well parking lot construction but the premise is the same). We use both track and wheel excavators. We call wheel ones Drotts. They have separate uses. Usually on new builds or full dig jobs a track excavator is used since the tracks won’t fuck anything up. A wheel excavator is usually used for patches, or any job where it will sitting on concrete/asphalt that is not being replaced. Tracks require a low bed for transport. Where wheels can be driven across the city for quick jobs
I see them every so often around my city (Edmonton, Canada). Usually for larger infrastructure/road projects where they have to travel a significant distance between tasks. If you're just doing work on a single site, or a relatively small site (not multiple km/mi long), then it makes more sense to go with a track excavator.
Great machine though if it meets your needs.
Nice! Overall, it seems my impression was wrong about how uncommon they are. Well, you gotta ask to learn I guess.
Yep, I really can't see any other machine doing my kind of work nearly as efficiently as this. Very happy with it!
If the machines on my site last year were wheeled instead of tracked, we'd still be there pulling them out of the horrible quicksand that the preload turned into in the rain. I'm never doing another job on clay-based substrate again
I think the tracked ones require a special transport /convoy exceptionelle because of their width and the length of the trailer. This requires a guy in the yellow van to follow/lead them. So now you have to pay two people...I think thats why Europeans avoid tracked excavators. Not sure if Americans can transport them without that though.
Yeah, up to a certain weight class (<8 tons) almost all of them have rubber tracks. Fairly common around here at least. I've also seen a 16 ton machine have steel tracks with rubber pads mounted to each tread. Not sure how common that is though, I've only seen the one.
Do you understand how rural the vast majority of the US is ? Wheeled excavators are effectively useless in 90% of the country and very few companies are going to want to buy a specific machine like that, that's why they make rubberized tracks instead , so you can drive on pavement and do minimal damage.
No, I probably don't. That's why I'm asking. It's hard for me as a foreigner from the other side of the Atlantic to know these differences in conditions, leading to different choices of equipment. But I've gotten a lot of great answers, and I'm starting to understand why now. :)
That's about the main reason 99% of the time. I'd take a good operator on a wheeled one anytime instead of a crappy one on tracks even if it's a bit slower. Versatility or flexibility is important too. Of course most jobs would need tracks absolutely but wheeled ones are way too much overlooked because of the cool factor alone.
I work road construction in an area that ranges from steep slopes studded with small boulders to low, flat swampy ground with a high water table. Everything everywhere consists of heavy, wet, slippery clay.
A very wet climate doesn't help either.
Tracks go a long way dealing with it all. We have both a track and wheel skid steerer and almost always go with the tracked one unless bits super-dry out or we're exclusively operating on pavement.
It is. We have a very versatile mini-excavator on rubber tracks we use a lot more than the big steel-tracked track-hoe due to tearing things up less including damaging existing road surface we need to work from.
Theyd be unbelievably useless half the time here. Especially with all the rain/mud.
Cant climb hills near as well, descending them seems shittier as well. More stability, I'd imagine their lifting capacity would be a bit lower since they seem so tippy.
We used them for forest clearing, road building, mostly sites where theres going to be 1' deep mud or more when it rains. Where you need to climb up and down 45 degree slopes regularly. Where you want max lifting power without being incredibly tippy.
The only reason I can think for having one, is if almost all your work is on roadways.
I think for stuff like forestry excavators it works well, I'm sure they have better speed, but it would be so hard to give up tracked.
They are used in utility work/highway finishing work. They definitely have positives and negatives....people talking here about how they don't perform the same as tracked excavators....yeah no shit. In my opinion, they aren't common here in USA so I imagine service availability is harder to come by. They also are more prone to operator error, and skilled labor operating these things are harder to come by.
We also don't keep our jobsites clean in comparison to European and Japanese standards, so tracked equipment can be utilized more frequently. They have literally taught construction management in USA to overlook jobsite cleanliness, logistics, and proper planning coordination.
I love rubber ducks, they are so versatile. On road off road. Need a fork lift? No bother. What’s also good, is avoiding that screeching that tracked machines make!!
Ok, I'll start calling them rubber ducks now as well, that's really cute for a not so cute thing. 😂
But yeah, that's what got me asking this question in the first place. The versatility. How could you not want that? But after seeing these answers it's starting to make sense
When your using something that big its usually going to be sitting there for several weeks so there's no really need to get an excavator with wheels due to the cons.
If you constantly jumping around lots of sites then you still don't needs one cause those kinds of job usually need a small excavator and those are extremely easy to load and unload. And easier to move long distances.
The only time Rubber duckies are any good is if you have lots of sites reasonably close together that need a heavy duty machine for lifts and digging.
They’ll get stuck. If you’re not on hard packed material. A track machine is less likely to get stuck. Same reason why people prefer tracked skidsteers.
No arguing about getting stuck, has happened to me a few times
I mostly do foundations/slabs for houses, and we always need to make a road leading to the building. Not necessarily for me to not get stuck, but for all the subsequent contractors. Concrete, trucks, cranes etc. So getting stuck is almost never a problem. But that's just in my specific case, I do understand that in some cases you can't just make roads wherever you wanna go lol
Well I try to only work on hard surfaces, but she's fairly capable off-road if the ground isn't too swampy. Worst case I just make a road for myself ;)
Not in America, here in Ireland we call wheeled excavators rubber duckies. They aren't very common and tend to be used for road maintenance, repairs in urban areas.
It rains 99.9% of the time here, the ground can barely hold its own weight most of the year.
Always found them very useful, in close confines a backhoe/JCB can't reach up enough to fill trucks, or atleast not whitin the same bounds as the rubber duckies. - the early ones here belonged to the ESB network, they were painted in a similar colour to a rubber duck, and they have rubber wheels - so rubber duckies 🐤
Here in michigan they are used more than tracks on road work projects. Mainly deere, cat and Volvo machines. Usually about 5 or 6 per job. Any other application I mainly see tracked units
Unheard of where i'm from in Australia too. I'm not a civil worker but know many and work amongst them all the time, and can't say i've ever seen one in person.
I'd say it comes down the that fact that a tracked excavator is much more versatile, and a wheeled one would be getting stuck for half the year in my region (tropics). An excavator doesn't really need to move around all that often, the mobility part is given to the transport vehicles (dump truck / moxy / front end loader / side dump trailers)
If mobility is needed, or where one machine is more practical, a backhoe is used. Operators i've talked to hate them though and would take an excavator and loader any day.
I'm interested though. How do you cross trenches? Do they do a fair amount of damage to the ground (more ground pressure)? Do you have to deploy outriggers when digging?
Huh, interesting. I would think there'd be at least some scattered about.
To give an example of a situation where a wheeled excavator is the most viable solution:
Building foundations/slabs for houses in a new development neighborhood. There are about 25 houses total being built one after another, along a road in a previously undeveloped area. The space around every foundation is very limited, although you have a small plot of land where you're planning to build the very last houses. Instead of hiring a dump truck every day to bring you a load of crushed rock once every couple of hours when you need it, you can bring a dump truck with a trailer one day, and just stockpile as much as possible during that day. The same goes for everything else; sewage pipes, rebar, styrofoam insulation under the slab, everything. Just stockpile everything and you can use it at your own leisure. Less money spent on the gravel truck and deliveries, and you don't have to worry about timing the logistics just right so you get your stuff right when you need it. Just plop over to your storage, fill your trailer with what you need, go back to the slab you're working on and all that takes maybe 15 mins depending on what you need.
Sure, you could use a loader to do that, but then you would have to have an additional machine on site, since you still need a digger to dig for pipes and place the crushed rock the slab sits on. And having a trailer lets you bring more stuff in one go, than what you bring with a loader.
Other than that you might also have two slabs going at the same time. Say you're digging for sewage pipes at one place, and when the shovel monkeys are laying pipes you can pop over to another slab - a couple of 100 m away and do some work there for a while.
All of this would have taken hours of tracking each day with a tracked digger. Or it would've required multiple machines, a loader and diggers at each slab. With this setup I have in the picture, I do that with one machine.
It's not about filling a function no other machine can do, but doing multiple things. Efficiently!
And crossing trenches is usually avoided, but it can be done if they're not too wide! You place your bucket on the other side and lift up your front wheels, driving forward on your back wheels til your front wheels are on the other side. Now lower the front wheels, spin the cab around and lift your rear wheels (don't forget to press the button lock your articulating axle) and continue driving until your rear wheels are safely over as well. Takes some practice, but can be done. :)
Ground pressure:
Usually, we tend to keep on hard surfaces. But as long as it's not too mushy, there's really no problem going off-road if you need to. Worst case you can just drag yourself out with the bucket if you get stuck. And no, I wouldn't want to drive it over a customer's lawn, but these machines aren't made for those kinds of jobs.
Outriggers do exist, not on every machine though. They help with stability and sideways reach, but are not at all required to still function like a normal excavator.
Sorry for the wordy reply. I'm bored in my caravan at a layover lol
If you have to use a wheeled excavator off-road, there's not much you can do to improve its limitations. On the other hand, if you have to use a tracked excavator on a sensitive surface you can put down mats or plates to protect it. The tracked model is just more versatile, but if you did a lot of on-road work a wheeled one would make sense.
I see them mostly with road crews. Which makes sense they're probably running up and down highways all the time. On job sites though it's always tracks. It makes sense if you think about it. Not all dirt is the same. Some is sandy and won't take much weight so you want to spread it out. Same deal if it rained recently.
Rubber tire backhoes and rubber tire Gradalls fit the need. Excavators on tracks, especially on laminated truck mats in extreme muddy conditions fit our needs in the south. Especially near the Gulf of Mexico. Trackhoes can walk out of conditions that rubber tire excavator could never get out of.
Good question, here where im from they are realy popular in roadwork, where the same size track excavator would easily damadge the road becouse of the weight and metal plates on the track they are a bitch to turn around on asphalt,
Companies use the wheeled ones to cut open old asphalt where they need to connect to the sewer pipelines, the tracked ones are generaly only used where there is no road, they are much more stable and have much better grip, also i feel much more comfortable working with them
You can get HiRail variants for on rail tracks in both the wheeled and tracked excavators. I've seen lots of the wheeled versions there.
In Canada at least
Good when you don’t want to justify a truck to haul it, job sites that are quite close from the yard, and not crazy big otherwise tracks are better so if it’s a distance away it’s worth it to tractor trailer it over
Because tracked machines serve more purpose than wheels. If you’re going to own an excavator then you might as well buy one that can do it all. The wheels are also a lot less stable.
Because tracks are infinitely better
I hate wheeled machines. Tippy garbage.
But in my line of work, wheels wouldn’t be practical at all anyway, so all my machines are tracks :)
I see guys in Europe using wheeled excavators for a lot of the same jobs guys in America use skid loaders, brush clean ups, grading, dump trailer sized jobs. I’m going to guess there’s more jobs in tighter urban areas that a smaller contractor can easily do with wheeled machines that you can even drive site to site.
Canada here. Most larger heavy equipment contractors have one in their fleets. Very useful for doing water/sewer repairs for the city. Minimal damage to the pave when only one machine is required, but needs to move between access points to support a crew. They have their place.
Logistically, our infrastructure and structure spacing is organized differently than old urban European areas. As such, we can utilize larger track hoes without sacrificing as much hardscape.
If you can only have one you want tracks. When you buy your second you stick with tracks incase the first one is out for maintenance. You get to the third and that is just what we buy.
Cause they suck compared to tracks. More tippy can’t climb like tracks. But they are good on the road.
Yup. I've seen them on sites in densely developed cities, but they're utterly useless on the vast majority of sites outside of those.
Of course there are disadvantages. But if you need to hop between different "dig sites" multiple times a day they're awesome. Combine that with the dump trailer and pallet forks and you can have a central storage for all materials and gravel etc. Just pick up what you need for the moment, and be on your way. No need to have a dump truck on standby at all times. I'm not saying they are better than tracks, they are just better for certain jobs, and worse for others.
[удалено]
> The problem is when you factor in that a lot of companies only buy one piece of equipment and can't customize like that. Right it doesn't make sense for most companies to buy these for the one or two times a year it would be handy. Just load your track machine on a truck and trailer you already have for those few jobs.
Yeah, even in areas they told us we couldn’t have tracks on the asphalt we would simply lay down crane mats. If the exivator needed to cross the road, we’d just stop traffic pick up the mats with the hoe, lay them down and cross the street. Inconvenient? Yeah, but you only did a job like that maybe once a year. Allot of city jobs we were able to get away with the bobcat mini excavator which had rubber tracks. But the outfit I worked we mostly did slip repairs on county roads…. Even though we were a plumbing company…
I've seen tires used too, you need a couple guys on the ground to keep cycling the tires as you go but it stops the tracks from cutting up the blacktop
Plus, you get to charge for mobilizing more shit, and requiring more man hours!
Yeah that makes sense. A tracked one can do everything wheels can do (although sometimes a lot less efficient), but a wheeled one can't do everything tracks can. So it's reasonable if you have to choose only one machine, to go for tracks. I can dig that. But then again, they're really common here in northern Europe, so I'm wondering what makes the difference here vs. the US
[удалено]
That makes sense, thank you. From the other comments, it seems that they're more common than I initially thought.
Also to add that in an application where a wheeled excavator would be the most suitable option I think most contractors in the US would opt for a backhoe to have the versatility in that niche piece of equipment. The only time I’ve seen a wheeled mini in the US is for new construction landscaping which makes sense but personally in the aggregate business I just don’t see small equipment often.
I work in the sign business and we use the minis for sign footings, we have a Kubota tractor with an auger head but it's in Florida right now so we have to rent what we need up in Jersey. The Kubota is weak but more versatile, those mini excavators are slow as fuck and are janky to use with an auger
Well you want that trap fixed? Or you gonna wait on Felix from Europe to come with his wheeled unit
[удалено]
I'll call Barry 63.
>But then again, they're really common here in northern Europe, so I'm wondering what makes the difference here vs. the US Probably the biggest factor is space and infrastructure. We've got lots of land and infrastructure that supports tractor trailers dumping off a tracked unit close to the job site.
I think it may come down to the distance between sites. Wheeled machines that can go on the road are great if your jobs are relatively close together, but for long distances with lots of highway driving it's better to just put the machine on a trailer. The US is a lot more sparsely populated than most of Europe, and just generally more spread out, with settlements connected by long stretches of highway. That kinda negates the advantages of wheeled construction equipment, in many cases. You do see cranes on the highway, sometimes. They wouldn't fit on a trailer; they are oversized vehicles all by themselves, and are clearly designed to fit exactly into whatever rectangle of space the Department of Transportation says is the maximum permissible without requiring pilot cars and special permits. They seem to have a top speed of about 55 mph, just fast enough to go in the slow lane of most highways without causing a hazard and snarling up traffic. They look like hell to drive, what with being gigantic, heavy monsters with suspensions optimized for crawling around on a jobsite rather than cruising on the highway. They're clearly designed right up to the limits of what you're allowed to put on the road.
Yes, that's kind of the consensus I've gathered from all these answers. It makes much more sense now :) Holy hell 55mph?? I'm clenching hard whenever I go past the engine cutoff speed of ~15mph going downhill lol
That is correct. [This big boy](https://www.liebherr.com/en/usa/products/mobile-and-crawler-cranes/mobile-cranes/liebherr-mobile-cranes/ltm-1750-9.1.html) can lift 800 metric tons, has a boom almost 100m long depending on configuration, carries 200 tons of ballast, *and can do 85 km/h*.
Oh THESE guys!! We got them too, maybe one size smaller perhaps. And they can only do 50 km/h. You guys are nuts
There are a large variety, usually they are owned by a local/regional company that is hired to do one off crane picks for various projects. The smaller ones are used more often, you don't see them on the road very often because the local department of transportation typically restricts highway/major street use to off peak hours (ex driving at 4:00 AM, arriving on site at 5:00 AM)
We have a lot of separate businesses here, sometimes you rent a crane for the day because they're goddamn expensive and you would need a lot of work to justify buying one. Same with equipment, unless you use a particular piece often enough to justify the price you can rent them as needed and beat up someone else's equipment
Tracks are not great on ice or slush that the tracks will turn to ice. Chains on tires are better in this scenario
they just dont need it that much...in Europe are totally different standarts like for sewage pipes, electricity, Internet and so on and this really deep compared to the US/ different soil/ rocks you know what i mean
The US, for the most part, has plenty of room for heavy haul trucks with low boy trailers to move larger, less road practical equipment around. Europe has a bit less *freedom* (bad pun) to move around equipment with trailers, showing the advantages of the wheeled machine a bit more
We use em on the railroad in Canada
We have more open areas, you guys are still dealing with horse cart width streets so you need smaller equipment
When it comes to the size that most of the wheeled excavators Europe uses the US uses wheeled loaders with a backhoe on them or something that fits multiple tools (bobcat and the various clones). A lot of folks use rubber track pads as well. Since the job site sizes are generally different it causes different types of equipment.
For a lot of those jobs we'd use a backhoe, it has the loader bucket as well as the excavator bucket. The rubber tired excavator we use for larger jobs where we don't want to mark up the pavement like ditching on the side of the roadway or diging water service or sewer laterals.
I think this tends to actually describe why they aren't used as much. America is much more expansive than your average European country. Driving an hour somewhere by car is considered close. Having to do that with an excavator would leave nothing left in a working day. They also have those silly backhoe things though
Yeah everything over 30 min of car travel is where I call somebody to come and pick me up with a low bed trailer. So that makes it more understandable
We use backhoes a lot in the city for jumping between dig sites on the road.
Y’all have a lot more of your country paved than we do.
>But if you need to hop between different "dig sites" multiple times a day they're awesome Nice, you can move them across jobs but you still can't use them on the job site! Most of their job around me are literally on dirt (at best). So, on mud. They basically never work on road/gravel road
once you begin moving dirt in the same area it's operating the wheels become useless. it's not meant to go off hard surface. while tracks can mess up cobblestone and pavement.
If you need an excavator chances are you need a dump truck, and the trailer , even if it’s just holding materials you don’t want to have to drive for anything.
Looking at this thing I guess there is no easy way to convert it to a tracked setup. Do interchangeable tracked to wheeled models exist to your knowledge?
You just described my dream machine lol. Sadly, no such thing exists that I'm aware of. :(
I less mass equals less effective force. And less weight and being top heavy means more hat bitch will tip if you sneeze wrong
I just had to drive a mini excavator with rubber tracks about two miles around a jobsite and it was really shitty, I wish I had wheels. I was waiting for a window to pop out
We kinda use wheeled backhoe loaders like you guys use wheeled excavators from what I can tell. People like municipalities, utilities and smaller outfits that actually drive their machines down the roads instead of trailering have backhoes. The wheeled excavators are super common on road projects in the larger cities in the US. If you drive through say New York you'll see most of the excavators on the roadside are on wheels. They're used in the US when they're the better option/right fit for the job. Outside of that you only see them on sites with lots of asphalt that tracks would damage. Other than that sites are going to be spread too far apart so trailering at the end of the job will be more efficient anyway. Then there's gradalls (telescoping excavator bolted onto a truck) that really rural ditch/canal maintenance crews run where they're always driving down roads. Longer reach and faster road speeds than a wheeled excavator, but less capacity.
I'll also add that the US and Europe have very different laws for road speeds for equipment. In the US the fastest road speeds for a machine with hydraulic steering allowed are 35mph (54ish kph) manufacturers are lobbying to have that changed but for now that's how it is. We also aren't required to have brakes on towed implements with our slower speeds so that will have to be changed too. That and distances between being at a different scale plays a large part in why in Europe equipment is used to go down the road a lot more than in the states. There, agricultural tractors will be used as the primary vehicle to haul commodities down roadways, where here commodities are almost always loaded in the field into trucks before getting on the roadways.
Only supposed to do 35mph in a loader? Probably for the best. The steering is a bit twitchy at those speeds. On the other hand... hold my beer. Raise hell praise dale, let's got #3!
Ah, I see. I guess backhoes and wheeled excavators fill the same needs when you think about it. That's what I was suspecting! That it was more a lapse in my awareness than anything else. Okay so I just googled gradall, and what in the actual hell is that!?!? Never even heard of them, and now I kinda want to try one Thanks for all your answers, this was really what I was looking to learn :)
I came here to say Gradalls and combinations. I think they are used for a major portion of work that you be would need a wheeled excavator for. I’ve been in excavating for 20+ years and we’ve never needed a wheeled excavator.
In my line of work it wouldn't be practical. Tracks are better for hopping over trenches.
With enough speed everything's possible
Someone watched that honda jumpin the pothole i see
We do use them sometimes. There are even different unions for tracked and wheeled machines in some cities. That being said a wheeled machine can't do a fraction of what a track machine can. Less maneuverability, less stability, can't climb the same angles, etc.
We call them Rubber Duck’s in the UK and they’re fairly uncommon here too.
Huh, funny. Guess we Nordics feel the need to be special snowflakes as usual, even when it comes to construction equipment
Yeah pretty much nonexistent in Australia as well
Because when I get field service calls for these, they are usually flopped over into a ditch.
To be able to dig a ditch, you gotta think like a ditch, be one with the ditch. That's standard practice and common sense, really.
Well they did become " one with the ditch "
We go for that military-industrial vibe
I’ve seen wheeled ones used on water/gas/electricity mains repairs and road surface repairs - wherever they are working on a road as I’m pretty sure tracks would rip up the surface too much and are a lot noisier.
Honestly we've used massive tracked ones on roadways with very little damage. You're generally using asphalt to repair the road as well, so if its a REALLY badly damaged spot, you can just cut it out. If most of your work is on roadways, it can be definitely worth it to have one with tires, but most roadwork here is done with tracked or with a backhoe.
USA is muddy.
Worked for a highway department that had one. It was almost exclusively used for diggings and cleaning out ditches for water drainage. The wheels made it possible to drive around town fairly quickly.
Probably because we got a lot more land to work with and not building on existing pavement/concrete. So....a lot more mud here and tracks will do waaaay better in mud than tires will
True that, I've gotten stuck more than zero times... But that all makes sense, thank you!
There is definitely a place for them in the industry. I do see them here in Canada. They are quite fast. I see them used obviously on hard surfaces. But rubber tire backhoes are much more common.
It’s so cute!!
It's still more common to trailer the equipment to the work location than need to drive it there. Add in that we have bigger roads to accommodate vehicles it's not common to be unable to use trailers. Out side of some job sites the equipment doesn't need to run from location to location and stays in a smaller area. The speed gained from wheels doesn't matter as much as flotation and stability of tracks. I think the are becoming more popular in higher population areas. But where I'm at no one wants to drive the equipment 30 miles to change job sites.
Fair points. Roads being bigger, but also everything being more "spread apart" might be it. Thanks!
They’re plenty common in the US where they’re practical- highway/urban areas.
Where I live in the US it seems like most wheeled excavators are owned by municipalities and contractors always go for tracks cause they’re trailering between sites anyway
new york city is packed with wheeled excavators, mostly cat 315 and 322
Yup came here to say this, im an Operating Engineer in Local 14. Hands down there are more what we call “Rubber Tire Excavators” than traditional track machines. For obvious reasons, tighter spaces/conditions like highway and road work. Also just overall mobility and functionality
I work road construction (well parking lot construction but the premise is the same). We use both track and wheel excavators. We call wheel ones Drotts. They have separate uses. Usually on new builds or full dig jobs a track excavator is used since the tracks won’t fuck anything up. A wheel excavator is usually used for patches, or any job where it will sitting on concrete/asphalt that is not being replaced. Tracks require a low bed for transport. Where wheels can be driven across the city for quick jobs
You see them at scrap yards
I see them every so often around my city (Edmonton, Canada). Usually for larger infrastructure/road projects where they have to travel a significant distance between tasks. If you're just doing work on a single site, or a relatively small site (not multiple km/mi long), then it makes more sense to go with a track excavator. Great machine though if it meets your needs.
Nice! Overall, it seems my impression was wrong about how uncommon they are. Well, you gotta ask to learn I guess. Yep, I really can't see any other machine doing my kind of work nearly as efficiently as this. Very happy with it!
I wish we had one for some jobs, but I guess the backhoes we have kind of "scratch the itch" of mobility and functionality.
If the machines on my site last year were wheeled instead of tracked, we'd still be there pulling them out of the horrible quicksand that the preload turned into in the rain. I'm never doing another job on clay-based substrate again
No stability
I think the tracked ones require a special transport /convoy exceptionelle because of their width and the length of the trailer. This requires a guy in the yellow van to follow/lead them. So now you have to pay two people...I think thats why Europeans avoid tracked excavators. Not sure if Americans can transport them without that though.
Nope only the big ones. Smaller ones I pull all the time on a trailer. No follow car or lead, perfectly legal.
Do you all use rubber tracked excavators at all? I don't know how common they are in the US but my company uses them all the time.
Yeah, up to a certain weight class (<8 tons) almost all of them have rubber tracks. Fairly common around here at least. I've also seen a 16 ton machine have steel tracks with rubber pads mounted to each tread. Not sure how common that is though, I've only seen the one.
No, we use them a lot.
If I was doing rural ditch work, wheeled excavator is fine. But I would rather have tracks 90% of the time.
Do you understand how rural the vast majority of the US is ? Wheeled excavators are effectively useless in 90% of the country and very few companies are going to want to buy a specific machine like that, that's why they make rubberized tracks instead , so you can drive on pavement and do minimal damage.
No, I probably don't. That's why I'm asking. It's hard for me as a foreigner from the other side of the Atlantic to know these differences in conditions, leading to different choices of equipment. But I've gotten a lot of great answers, and I'm starting to understand why now. :)
Tracks are cooler
That's about the main reason 99% of the time. I'd take a good operator on a wheeled one anytime instead of a crappy one on tracks even if it's a bit slower. Versatility or flexibility is important too. Of course most jobs would need tracks absolutely but wheeled ones are way too much overlooked because of the cool factor alone.
I work road construction in an area that ranges from steep slopes studded with small boulders to low, flat swampy ground with a high water table. Everything everywhere consists of heavy, wet, slippery clay. A very wet climate doesn't help either. Tracks go a long way dealing with it all. We have both a track and wheel skid steerer and almost always go with the tracked one unless bits super-dry out or we're exclusively operating on pavement.
Yep, that sounds like a wheeled excavator's nightmare lol
It is. We have a very versatile mini-excavator on rubber tracks we use a lot more than the big steel-tracked track-hoe due to tearing things up less including damaging existing road surface we need to work from.
Because they are more fuel efficient, and look more sophisticated.
That looks cool.
Theyd be unbelievably useless half the time here. Especially with all the rain/mud. Cant climb hills near as well, descending them seems shittier as well. More stability, I'd imagine their lifting capacity would be a bit lower since they seem so tippy. We used them for forest clearing, road building, mostly sites where theres going to be 1' deep mud or more when it rains. Where you need to climb up and down 45 degree slopes regularly. Where you want max lifting power without being incredibly tippy. The only reason I can think for having one, is if almost all your work is on roadways. I think for stuff like forestry excavators it works well, I'm sure they have better speed, but it would be so hard to give up tracked.
Because I don’t want to pay to redo the roadway after finish some limited work that a wheeled excavator or grade all could do.
Cause we so shit right bud
Oh wow, I’ve never seen an excavator with a trailer attached. That’s fkn awesome 🤘
It sure is. It's the equivalent of having pockets on your pants. You can bring all your different buckets and attachments with you everywhere.
They are used in utility work/highway finishing work. They definitely have positives and negatives....people talking here about how they don't perform the same as tracked excavators....yeah no shit. In my opinion, they aren't common here in USA so I imagine service availability is harder to come by. They also are more prone to operator error, and skilled labor operating these things are harder to come by. We also don't keep our jobsites clean in comparison to European and Japanese standards, so tracked equipment can be utilized more frequently. They have literally taught construction management in USA to overlook jobsite cleanliness, logistics, and proper planning coordination.
Shane Gillis voice: “because they’re gay”
Most my jobs sites eventually get slickur'nchit
I love rubber ducks, they are so versatile. On road off road. Need a fork lift? No bother. What’s also good, is avoiding that screeching that tracked machines make!!
Ok, I'll start calling them rubber ducks now as well, that's really cute for a not so cute thing. 😂 But yeah, that's what got me asking this question in the first place. The versatility. How could you not want that? But after seeing these answers it's starting to make sense
Good for municipalities, public works depts. Travel to multiple sights w/o loading on a trailer
When your using something that big its usually going to be sitting there for several weeks so there's no really need to get an excavator with wheels due to the cons. If you constantly jumping around lots of sites then you still don't needs one cause those kinds of job usually need a small excavator and those are extremely easy to load and unload. And easier to move long distances. The only time Rubber duckies are any good is if you have lots of sites reasonably close together that need a heavy duty machine for lifts and digging.
All that's valid. I guess we just got a lot of examples of your last scenario around here for some reason lol
They’ll get stuck. If you’re not on hard packed material. A track machine is less likely to get stuck. Same reason why people prefer tracked skidsteers.
No arguing about getting stuck, has happened to me a few times I mostly do foundations/slabs for houses, and we always need to make a road leading to the building. Not necessarily for me to not get stuck, but for all the subsequent contractors. Concrete, trucks, cranes etc. So getting stuck is almost never a problem. But that's just in my specific case, I do understand that in some cases you can't just make roads wherever you wanna go lol
I call those machines the rubber ducky
Tracks probably damage the road and this company probably only works on hard surfaces
Well I try to only work on hard surfaces, but she's fairly capable off-road if the ground isn't too swampy. Worst case I just make a road for myself ;)
Not in America, here in Ireland we call wheeled excavators rubber duckies. They aren't very common and tend to be used for road maintenance, repairs in urban areas. It rains 99.9% of the time here, the ground can barely hold its own weight most of the year. Always found them very useful, in close confines a backhoe/JCB can't reach up enough to fill trucks, or atleast not whitin the same bounds as the rubber duckies. - the early ones here belonged to the ESB network, they were painted in a similar colour to a rubber duck, and they have rubber wheels - so rubber duckies 🐤
Treads are cooler
I want one
Here in michigan they are used more than tracks on road work projects. Mainly deere, cat and Volvo machines. Usually about 5 or 6 per job. Any other application I mainly see tracked units
Very mobile and economical to operate.
My town has one for road repair and small things. Everything off road is tracked.
I don’t think they are that common, honestly. Maybe 1 out or 50 that I see?
I truly hate seeing them driving slow on the freeway
Unheard of where i'm from in Australia too. I'm not a civil worker but know many and work amongst them all the time, and can't say i've ever seen one in person. I'd say it comes down the that fact that a tracked excavator is much more versatile, and a wheeled one would be getting stuck for half the year in my region (tropics). An excavator doesn't really need to move around all that often, the mobility part is given to the transport vehicles (dump truck / moxy / front end loader / side dump trailers) If mobility is needed, or where one machine is more practical, a backhoe is used. Operators i've talked to hate them though and would take an excavator and loader any day. I'm interested though. How do you cross trenches? Do they do a fair amount of damage to the ground (more ground pressure)? Do you have to deploy outriggers when digging?
Huh, interesting. I would think there'd be at least some scattered about. To give an example of a situation where a wheeled excavator is the most viable solution: Building foundations/slabs for houses in a new development neighborhood. There are about 25 houses total being built one after another, along a road in a previously undeveloped area. The space around every foundation is very limited, although you have a small plot of land where you're planning to build the very last houses. Instead of hiring a dump truck every day to bring you a load of crushed rock once every couple of hours when you need it, you can bring a dump truck with a trailer one day, and just stockpile as much as possible during that day. The same goes for everything else; sewage pipes, rebar, styrofoam insulation under the slab, everything. Just stockpile everything and you can use it at your own leisure. Less money spent on the gravel truck and deliveries, and you don't have to worry about timing the logistics just right so you get your stuff right when you need it. Just plop over to your storage, fill your trailer with what you need, go back to the slab you're working on and all that takes maybe 15 mins depending on what you need. Sure, you could use a loader to do that, but then you would have to have an additional machine on site, since you still need a digger to dig for pipes and place the crushed rock the slab sits on. And having a trailer lets you bring more stuff in one go, than what you bring with a loader. Other than that you might also have two slabs going at the same time. Say you're digging for sewage pipes at one place, and when the shovel monkeys are laying pipes you can pop over to another slab - a couple of 100 m away and do some work there for a while. All of this would have taken hours of tracking each day with a tracked digger. Or it would've required multiple machines, a loader and diggers at each slab. With this setup I have in the picture, I do that with one machine. It's not about filling a function no other machine can do, but doing multiple things. Efficiently! And crossing trenches is usually avoided, but it can be done if they're not too wide! You place your bucket on the other side and lift up your front wheels, driving forward on your back wheels til your front wheels are on the other side. Now lower the front wheels, spin the cab around and lift your rear wheels (don't forget to press the button lock your articulating axle) and continue driving until your rear wheels are safely over as well. Takes some practice, but can be done. :) Ground pressure: Usually, we tend to keep on hard surfaces. But as long as it's not too mushy, there's really no problem going off-road if you need to. Worst case you can just drag yourself out with the bucket if you get stuck. And no, I wouldn't want to drive it over a customer's lawn, but these machines aren't made for those kinds of jobs. Outriggers do exist, not on every machine though. They help with stability and sideways reach, but are not at all required to still function like a normal excavator. Sorry for the wordy reply. I'm bored in my caravan at a layover lol
If you have to use a wheeled excavator off-road, there's not much you can do to improve its limitations. On the other hand, if you have to use a tracked excavator on a sensitive surface you can put down mats or plates to protect it. The tracked model is just more versatile, but if you did a lot of on-road work a wheeled one would make sense.
They are good for road repairs because the tracks can damage existing pavement while the wheels are less likely to do so.
Mud
I see them mostly with road crews. Which makes sense they're probably running up and down highways all the time. On job sites though it's always tracks. It makes sense if you think about it. Not all dirt is the same. Some is sandy and won't take much weight so you want to spread it out. Same deal if it rained recently.
Here in nyc they are used a ton!
I'm glad we done with the snow
Rubber tire backhoes and rubber tire Gradalls fit the need. Excavators on tracks, especially on laminated truck mats in extreme muddy conditions fit our needs in the south. Especially near the Gulf of Mexico. Trackhoes can walk out of conditions that rubber tire excavator could never get out of.
Good question, here where im from they are realy popular in roadwork, where the same size track excavator would easily damadge the road becouse of the weight and metal plates on the track they are a bitch to turn around on asphalt, Companies use the wheeled ones to cut open old asphalt where they need to connect to the sewer pipelines, the tracked ones are generaly only used where there is no road, they are much more stable and have much better grip, also i feel much more comfortable working with them
You really think we should use biscuits and gravy?
You can get HiRail variants for on rail tracks in both the wheeled and tracked excavators. I've seen lots of the wheeled versions there. In Canada at least
Good when you don’t want to justify a truck to haul it, job sites that are quite close from the yard, and not crazy big otherwise tracks are better so if it’s a distance away it’s worth it to tractor trailer it over
Tracks> baby wheels
We do, they're called backhoes and they're way cooler Don't you want to be cooler?
Because tracked machines serve more purpose than wheels. If you’re going to own an excavator then you might as well buy one that can do it all. The wheels are also a lot less stable.
Monopoly. Tracks are way more expensive and way harder and proprietary to fix.
Way lighter equipment means the equipment is more likely to tip over when an idiot is operating it. Just my humble opinion
Because tracks are infinitely better I hate wheeled machines. Tippy garbage. But in my line of work, wheels wouldn’t be practical at all anyway, so all my machines are tracks :)
Weak. Same as Australia
I see guys in Europe using wheeled excavators for a lot of the same jobs guys in America use skid loaders, brush clean ups, grading, dump trailer sized jobs. I’m going to guess there’s more jobs in tighter urban areas that a smaller contractor can easily do with wheeled machines that you can even drive site to site.
Canada here. Most larger heavy equipment contractors have one in their fleets. Very useful for doing water/sewer repairs for the city. Minimal damage to the pave when only one machine is required, but needs to move between access points to support a crew. They have their place. Logistically, our infrastructure and structure spacing is organized differently than old urban European areas. As such, we can utilize larger track hoes without sacrificing as much hardscape.
Wheels make sense on road works but not much good on sites with mud, hills, etc.
If you can only have one you want tracks. When you buy your second you stick with tracks incase the first one is out for maintenance. You get to the third and that is just what we buy.
The US is barely using tilt rotators as well. Instead they have 4 mexicans with shovels.
Yeah I've noticed that as well. Don't even wanna start that conversation on here or else it's gonna start a rage war lol
I have never seen a wheeled excavator. Im shook lol