Heavy Equipment – The Dragline Excavator

One of Heavy Equipment’s largest machines is the dragline excavator. This equipment is used in both civil engineering and surface mining. Smaller types are often used in road and port construction, particularly if an old piece of road needs tearing up.

The larger types are used in strip-mining operations generally to extract coal. These are amongst the largest heavy equipment in use and weigh in the vicinity of 2000 metric tonnes. There have been machines weighing up to 13,000 metric tonnes.

A dragline bucket system consists of a large bucket which is suspended from a boom. The bucket is maneuvered by means of a number of ropes and chains. Powered by large diesel or electric motors, the hoist rope supports the bucket and hoist-coupler assembly from the boom. By skillfully controlling the hoist and the dragrope the bucket is, as the name suggests, dragged through the material to be excavated.

For civil engineering, there other machines that have been specifically built to replace the dragline. Training to operate a drag line is often done on the job. However most employers preview to employ those that have heavy equipment experience on machines like a bulldozer.

You can get your bulldozer credentials through ATS Heavy Equipment Training Schools. Drop in and check out what courses may suit you.