There are a few specific fields of work that require the workers to have quite a lot of equipment to be able to do their job properly, and construction is one of those. The nature of the work mandates the presence of both sturdy safety gear and specialised tools for certain jobs. The safety gear usually comes in the form of a hard hat for protection and a high-visibility jacket so that workers are easier to spot. As for the specialised tools, while there are a lot, there are a few that stand out as being present on every building site, and for a good reason too.
The old adage of “measure twice and cut once” is good advice in general, but on a construction site it also serves as an instruction on how to do your job properly. There are a variety of different measuring tools and all of them have an important role on every site, and for every task performed on the site as well. The most common construction site measuring tools are the tape measure and the measuring wheel. Both of these are used to measure exact distances, but the difference is that while the wheel is used to measure greater lengths, the tape measure is smaller and thereby used for more intricate calculations.
Cable locators, or otherwise known as underground service locators are devices commonly found on most construction sites, and as their name implies, they are used to find buried electrical cables, water pipes, gas lines etc. They work by either detecting an underground electro-magnetic signal caused by a running current, or by directly or indirectly feeding their own signal into the cable in order to follow it and map the exact location (for metallic pipes like the water mains a metal detector can do just fine too). These devices are of great importance in excavation as they help mark the positions that workers should avoid in case something goes wrong and an accident happens with any such underground services.
Air compressors are another piece of equipment that is found on nearly every building site. They work by converting power from an electric, diesel or fuel motor into potential energy in the form of pressurised air. Depending on the motor, there are some types that are more suited to certain tasks than others. The electric motor is perfect for indoor use since it needs a power source and produces no fumes, but while the other two do need to burn fuel and can only be used outdoors, they are more powerful than the electric models, which makes them more fit to run the machines on the sites.
As mentioned before, the above mentioned items don’t even make up a fraction of the needed pieces of equipment that you would need for these kinds of jobs. However, while the other items in this field have a more single purpose function depending on the exact work that’s being done, these items can be, and are used in nearly every construction site.