The salesman offered to let me operate this unit and I took him up on it. I ran it for about 20 minutes, first leveling and back-blading some D-1 in the back parking lot. Then I did a little cut and fill along the toe of a virgin incline of about 15%. I wasn't aggresive, only putting the left side of the blade in slightly. As it pulled the dozer left into the hill I applied slight right turn with the joy stick. The dozer stopped and the left track spun in the dirt. In order to move forward again I had to lift the blade making it next to impossible to do such a simple task. On the way driving out there I saw a Komatsu D3 and stopped to talked with the owner. He said, as others here have, the Komatsu D2's are only good for light finish work. He also said their gearing is screwy and that there needs to be a another gear between first and second. I don't know about the gearing, but I found this small dozer totally lacking in terms of doing any real cat work. Dan
The D21P is a swamp type machine,fitted with apex plates. I would suggest that it is not good for dozing anything other than what it was designed for...mud,snow & muck. A D21A/E with a scarifier on rear is a more handy & capable performer for excavating.....but you are dealing with a 4 Tonne machine,basically designed for swamp reclaimation,trim work & clean-ups,which they do well. You might need a larger machine,designed for dirt dozing.
Yep, I started out looking at Cat D3's and then came across Komatsu. They were tempting because of their size. I'm back to looking at Cat's and Deeres..
We rented one to finish grade some areas on our property and the light weight is really nice when your trying not to pack the lawn in. Like you were told, it excelled at that, as long as you didn't try to push too much with it. We dumped a pile here and there from our GMC 6500 dump, so maybe 6 or 7 yards, and it really struggled. It worked best when I really cranked the throttle up, but who wants to make it scream to do any work? In comparison, we rented a D31 Komstat II another time. What a difference. The hydrostatic transmission with variable range selector was great and it had plenty of power. Of course it was pretty new and considerably more expensive than a D21.
just testin