Digger celebrates the Caterpillar D10

by Nick Drew | Mon 18 Sep 2017

Digger celebrates the Caterpillar D10

This week Caterpillar’s iconic D10 dozer celebrates its 40^th birthday and we couldn’t let such a milestone pass without a post featuring a tracked type tractor that revolutionised the industry forever.

It was 1977 when the first models rolled off the production line in America, I was only just leaving school but recall this event being hugely anticipated at the time. There had been much anticipation about a new large dozer to take over from the then current “king” of the dozers the Cat D9 but not many were prepared to see the radical new style especially its Hi Drive elevated sprocket design. I caught my first sight of the new giant dozer in an issue of the then industry leading publication Construction News.

Photo above courtesy of JW Cat on Flickr. There had long been calls for a larger more powerful dozer for the large mining and earthmoving projects and there had been a number of developments including the coupling together of two D9 tractors side by side, but this new model was an answer to the prayers of the contractors who required these giant beasts.

Photo above courtesy of Travis Owen on Facebook.

The new D10 was a machine with no rival for weight, power or productivity. The machine offered 50 percent higher productivity than the aforementioned D9 dozer, tipping the scales at over 190,000lbs (86,180kg) the D10 measured 15ft (4,6 m) tall, 12ft (3,7 m) wide and slightly more than 31ft (9,4) long. The D10 was powered by a Cat D348, V12 diesel engine which offered a power output rating of 700hp (522 kW).

The D9 which has featured on this blog numerous times over the years was without doubt the best track-type tractor of its day so the D10 had big shoes to fill. The main goals set out by the design team included, high productivity; modular design; simplified maintenance; operator efficiency; and transportability. Incredibly research on these machines went back as far as 1969 with the first prototype D10’s featuring the elevated sprocket design being built in 1973, then over the next 4 years the machine was fine-tuned ready for launch date.

Although initially met with some scepticism the machines were soon embraced by the loyal Caterpillar customers who quickly realised the capabilities of the new tractor. Today the tractor is currently represented in the Cat tracked-type tractor range by the D10T2 model with other elevated sprocket design models in the range being D6N and T machines, the D8T, D9T and the tractor that took over as the largest in the range when it was launched in 1986 the D11 which is currently in its T series variant. Check out this promotional video from Caterpillar featuring the latest D10T2 model.

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