Looking at the downtown landscape, it can be hard to believe that at one time
all the condos, single family homes, and lofts for sale Toronto has to offer
were non-existent. In fact, nothing stood on the Toronto site except acres of
land; some of it rolling meadow, some of it beach, some of it rocky hills.
What is even more impressive to consider is that when most of the downtown
area was first developed, people lacked the heavy machinery that makes projects
so easy today. They had to break up all that earth by hand or, if they were
lucky, with inefficient and somewhat primitive equipment like the steam shovel.
Today, of course, construction at every step is made easier by the number of
incredibly powerful machines at our disposal. Much of today's Oakville real estate development would not have been possible without the use of our
modern industrial construction machines, one of the most important being the
excavator.
Excavators are used most often to dig holes and trenches for foundations, pipe
systems, and other important sub-ground level parts of construction projects.
The long arms attached to a huge bucket give their use away to anyone coming
across the site of a future Markham home; these machines were clearly meant
for digging!
The buckets on excavators almost always have jutting teeth of varying shapes
and spaces. These teeth help the bucket to dig into the ground, allowing the
traction needed to remove large chunks of earth from their former position.
Buckets are not the only attachments used on excavators in their manifestation
as construction vehicles, however. The booming development of hydraulics has
meant that the bender of the excavator can be fitted with tools including augers,
breakers, or grapples. Obviously all of these attachments have the purpose of
breaking ground, but the ability to use them on an excavator means that the
machine can be used for a lot more than just digging.
Excavators can be used to do minor jobs usually performed by other machines
when they build real estate. Web site information such as we provide here might
be the only way you would have found out that excavators are often fitted with
a blade similar to that found on a bulldozer; therefore, they can be used to
move small piles of the very earth they brought up in the first place!
Just as the idea for the steam shovel eventually evolved into the excavator,
the idea of the excavator itself is now evolving. We mentioned the hydraulic
attachments which allows the excavator to be used for several purposes other
than purely digging, but the machine itself has seen an important shift in makeup
over the last decade.
Prior to the 1990s, excavators used a counterweight in order to provide more
digging force and lifting capacity. This weight generally hung off the back
of the machine, making it impossible to turn the excavator the whole way around
in tight sites. Tail swing excavators first appeared in the early 1990s. The
cumbersome counterweights were done away with altogether, and the machine could
now complete its radius even in tight spots.
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