It was a difficult scenario to sort out at first. You were the driver and the only one awake in the car. Your husband was asleep in the front passenger seat, and your 18 daughter was resting in the back seat. You were driving Interstate 29 south to Joplin, Missouri. Shortly after you left Kansas City it had started to rain, and the rain continued to get heavier as you continued south. The rain is what made the heavy equipment with the snow plow confusing. You knew that it was not cold enough to snow so you could not understand why the plow looked like it was coming on to the interstate.
By the third exit you had it mostly figured out. The large pieces of road equipment were not coming onto the interstate, they were blocking the entrance on to the south bound lanes. Three miles later, when you had seen another large snowplow blocking another entrance ramp to the interstate you decided you better wake up your passengers. Within minutes they checked their phones and found out that flood warnings were closing the northern part of the interstate that you had just driven through. Turns out the heavy equipment components were not as confusing as they looked. The news that night showed the large plow buckets being used to push fallen tree branches and other trash past gutters and drains on the ramp approaches. Who knew that the same type of plows that were clearing the streets in Omaha would be shoving away flood debris in Missouri?
Large pieces of heavy equipment are expensive so it is important that they are durable and able to do several jobs. In fact, many kinds of construction vehicles and other heavy equipment components last as long as 15 years. Heavy equipment servicing can extend these machines even longer. While interstate travelers may most often see large bulldoze trucks, these machines are not necessarily the most common. The following pieces of machine ranked among the most used products in 2011, reaching nearly 10% of the North American construction equipment market:

• aerial work platforms
• crawler excavators
• crawler dozers
• wheel loaders

Even if some heavy equipment components break down and can not be fixed, many times owners are able to reuse of resale bucket pins, cutting edges, and other heavy equipment parts. Even without the high resale values of these used parts, the new heavy machine market is a formidable industry. In fact, the North American 2011 market was the second largest construction equipment market worldwide, creating revenue of more than $30 billion.