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Machine Of The Month


A SHORT HISTORY OF MOVING DIRT


It’s a little known fact that the first incident of rearranging dirt happened around 16,000 years ago at Lascaux in Southwestern France. As it turned out, one of the famous cave paintings there was recently interpreted to reveal a story that goes something like this:

“Mon Dieu!” exclaimed Pierre. “I cannot go to sleep. I have moved all over the cave, and yet, I cannot find a place that is not lumpy, rocky and miserable.”

The cavemen puzzled over the problem, but eventually it was Marcel (who was also the first to realize the advantage of having thumbs) who came up with the idea of using his hands to move the dirt and rocks around to make a smoother surface for sleeping. And voila! The first earth mover was simply the flat of a hand used to push and scoop dirt and rocks from point A, to point B.

Magnifique!

Once Marcel and the gang realized they could intentionally move dirt and rocks around, the whole notion of rearranging the ground just snowballed from there. For awhile it was just a fad, with people moving debris into piles indiscriminately. Before long, one guy came up with the idea of using a stick to push some rocks out of the way, and then another caveman invented the process of employing a flat stone to push nice wedges of earth here and there.

As we all know, Man eventually became creative and savvy enough to push dirt around to make some amazing structures, like Egypt’s pyramids and Machu Picchu in Peru. Unfortunately, while engineering blossomed, the fine art of writing and communication wasn’t progressing nearly as successfully. Thus, we only have odd, unintelligible scribbles that reveal nothing about their construction methods. Then the Dark Ages hit and, well, just about everything went to hell in a hand basket.

Moving right along to the Renaissance, people started thinking about pushing dirt around and building things again. Inventors like da Vinci came up with fancy new tools, and the peasants had finally figured out how to coerce animals into doing most of the heavy work.  Eventually, mules and other sturdy animals were hitched up to plows and metal plates to clear fields.

Enter the Machine Age, and basic farming tractors tricked out with straight, front-mounted plates for rough landscaping and plowing became our first bulldozers. Eventually the blade was refined into a curve that vastly improved cutting power, and later a rear-mounted “ripper claw” was added for breaking up boulders and sections of road. By World War II, the Seabees, the Navy’s special construction battalions that handled Navy construction in combat zones, made “bulldozer” and “airstrip” household words.

With the end of WWII, we finally come to our Machine of the Month – the Komatsu D575, which is currently the largest bulldozer in production in the world. Komatsu Ltd., in business since 1921, built the first prototype of a Japanese bulldozer in 1943, the Model I Ground Leveling Machine. The company was poised to help the world rebuild and reconstruct in the booming 1950s.

This “crawler dozer,” the biggest “Superdozer” in the world, is assembled by Komatsu at its Rokko plant in Japan. It’s powered by a turbo-loaded, drawer-air-cooled 12 cylinder diesel engine with the code name SA12V170E (editor’s note: don’t you think a “code name” should be something you can actually remember, like “Gus” or “Gladiator” or something?). Now for a bunch of statistics for you engineering types out there:

The motor has a performance range of 1150 HP and has the capacity equal to the tank content of a medium-range car with 1800 r.p.m. Consequently, the gigantic engine and amazing motor-torque allow this Superdozer enough oomph to push over 485,000 lbs. The huge blade weighs a whopping 22,000 lbs., is over 24’ wide and nearly 11’ tall, and has a capacity of a remarkable 90 yd3. 

Now, the machine itself is 38’5” long from the front of the blade to the end of the ripper. The operator’s cab measurement from the ground to the top of the roof is 16’ high. It does not tell us anywhere how the driver gets into the cab. I’d really like to know that . . . .

Finally, it’s only fair to note that there was once a bulldozer in Italy called the Acco that was larger, but it has gone into retirement. I’d like to think it was one of those little-known machines that got lost in the mists of time, having played a huge role in building the Coliseum.