Digger, digger, bobcat!
Most people’s etymology of construction equipment goes as far as “Digger”, “Dump truck”, “Forklift”, and maybe “Bobcat” — which is great if your target sentence is “I saw a really cool orange digger today” but, let’s be honest, there’s some nuances that aren’t covered by this breakdown.
Let’s start with “Diggers”. What is a “digger”? Seems it’s anything which “digs” or shovels.
Broadly speaking, you’re probably looking for the word “excavator” and specifically you’re probably looking for “tracked bucket excavator” which are sort of the archetypal ethos of excavators. They can be broken down within that by their size (mini, small, medium, large) and then again by how long their boom (arm) is. Excavators with long arms can both reach farther, higher, and, perhaps more importantly, dig deeper.
Beyond just buckets, the classic excavator shape is adaptable to a wide range of jobs. With an articulated arm and hydraulic power, the base excavator shape is widely adaptable to pretty much any situation where you need to move around a powered implement. Beyond special implements, tools like “rotators” and powered thumbs extend the reach or utility of the default “bucket” tool — the excavator is also widely used as an impromptu crane by chaining off the bucket.
Beyond the tracked version, excavators are equipped with movating parts from wheels, to rails, to amphibious floats or even just fixed in place.
The mini-excavator is sort of a special tool in itself being applicable to an enormous range of small jobs and tight spaces. Colloquially these are often called “JCBs”, after the company who claim to have invented them.
Beyond the shrunken-proportion mini there’s also micro excavators and even smaller (or larger) remotely operated excavators — all of which are typically as versatile with attachments as their larger equivalents.
Bobcats are pretty much the archetypical example of both the broader payloader (or front-end loader) class of equipment, specifically the mini-payloader. Bobcats with various attachments are used for virtually every job — from construction to lawn care to logistics and improvised military equipment.
Bucket loaders are generically vehicles with a bucket on the front that goes up and down and tilts to dump(but importantly not generally in-and-out or side-to-side). Beyond the bucket they can generally be equipped with attachments ranging from blades or box-graders for light dozing to forks or grabbers for lifting palletized loads. In virtually all resource industries the loader forms the back-bone of the material handling chain (together with the dump-truck or hauler).
Aside: A fascinating designation for loaders used in the mining industry is “no lift limit” which means the structure of the lifting mechanism is several safety factors stronger than the actual lifting actuators — this means the operator is free to attempt to lift anything they like without concern for damaging the equipment.
And finally the piece which brings them all together is the backhoe or loader backhoe tractor. Even with the default attachments it’s versatile enough to load, dig, or pull/haul. With a dizzying array of attachments for either end, they can be used to power a wide range of equipment (like say a pump or log splitter) or for virtually any other task a small construction or agricultural job might need.
