What is it?
Skip Loaders (also known as front end loaders or wheel loaders) are pieces of construction equipment, often around the same size as a standard car and are optimized for digging and loading heavy material into trucks. We use our skip loaders to haul away old asphalt, rocks, dirt, and debris, as well as to level out the subgrade before installing asphalt. Unlike its cousin, the skid steer, the skip loader’s name is unrelated to its movement. The skip loader gets its name from the mining industry where ore was loaded into large can-shaped containers called “skips” and moved from one location to another.
How does it work?
Skip loaders’ primary features are the front-mounted bucket for hauling and a rear-mounted box scraper for leveling the ground. The lift capacity of the bucket ranges from 5,000 and 7,000 pounds of material. The box scraper attached to the rear is dragged across the ground behind the loader, scraping the earth with its large blade to level out any imperfections and collect excess dirt.
Rather than a continuous track tread or “tank tread” (as you would find on some other construction equipment, like our grinder) skip loaders maneuver on 4 sturdy wheels with 2 small wheels up front and 2 large wheels in the back.