What a Bulldozer Does and Where It Works

A tractor with a blade

A bulldozer, often called a dozer, is a heavy tractor that runs on two steel tracks. At the front it carries a wide steel blade that pushes soil, rock, sand and rubble. At the back it often carries a ripper, a strong hooked tooth that tears up hard ground so the blade can move it.

Most dozers run on tracks, so the full name is crawler dozer or crawler tractor. Tracks spread the machine's weight over a large area of ground and give it a strong grip. This is why a dozer can push heavy loads and work on soft or rough ground where a wheeled machine would sink or spin. Some dozers run on rubber tyres, but they are less common, and this course is about the crawler type.

Dozers come in many sizes, from small machines of a few tonnes used for landscaping to very large machines used in mines. The machine in this course's 3D explorer weighs about 20 tonnes, a common size on construction sites. Always learn the size, weight and limits of your own machine from its operator's manual.

Where you meet a dozer

Dozers work on building sites, road and rail projects, quarries and mines, landfill sites, oil and gas well pads and pipeline routes, and in farming and forestry. In each place the dozer shares the ground with people on foot, trucks, excavators and rollers. Most serious accidents with dozers happen to people near the machine, or to the operator when the machine rolls over. Both are the focus of this course.