The Acco Super Bulldozer is the largest and most powerful tracked

bulldozer A bulldozer or dozer (also called a crawler) is a large, motorized machine equipped with a metal blade to the front for pushing material: soil, sand, snow, rubble, or rock during construction work. It travels most commonly on continuous track ...

ever made. It was built in

Portogruaro Portogruaro ( vec, Porto, fur, Puart) is a town and ''comune'' in the Metropolitan City of Venice, Veneto, northern Italy. The city is the centre of a district, made up of 11 ''comuni'', which form the Venezia Orientale with the San Donà di Piav ...

in northern

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical re ...

by the Umberto Acco company. The Acco super bulldozer was constructed mainly of

Caterpillar Caterpillars ( ) are the larval stage of members of the order Lepidoptera (the insect order comprising butterflies and moths). As with most common names, the application of the word is arbitrary, since the larvae of sawflies (suborder Sym ...

parts; however, many other components were specially adapted. The dozer blade, for example, is bigger than anything Caterpillar has ever made. This bulldozer has a gross weight of 183

tonnes The tonne ( or ; symbol: t) is a unit of mass equal to 1000 kilograms. It is a non-SI unit accepted for use with SI. It is also referred to as a metric ton to distinguish it from the non-metric units of the short ton ( United States ...

and is powered by two Caterpillar engines placed horizontally opposed, which deliver a total combined output of . The super bulldozer has a blade that is wide and high, whilе the total length of the bulldozer is over , from the tip of the blade to the ripper on the rear. The ripper alone is about tall, being powered by huge hydraulic rams. This bulldozer was initially built to be exported to

Libya Libya (; ar, ليبيا, Lībiyā), officially the State of Libya ( ar, دولة ليبيا, Dawlat Lībiyā), is a country in the Maghreb region in North Africa. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to Egypt–Libya bo ...

in the early 1980s to help in land development. As the Leader of Libya,

Colonel Gaddafi Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, . Due to the lack of standardization of transcribing written and regionally pronounced Arabic, Gaddafi's name has been romanized in various ways. A 1986 column by ''The Straight Dope'' lists 32 spelling ...

, was heavily involved with international terrorism at that time, the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

imposed a

trade embargo Economic sanctions are commercial and financial penalties applied by one or more countries against a targeted self-governing state, group, or individual. Economic sanctions are not necessarily imposed because of economic circumstances—they may ...

on that country in 1986. As a direct consequence of these trade restrictions, the completed Acco Dozer was never shipped to its intended destination. This bulldozer has never been put to any operational use and was put into storage where it was built. Acco ceased to exist when its founder Umberto Acco died and his son died shortly afterward. They left no legacy for managing the Acco company. Beginning in 2008, Acco's former main and secondary shops slowly turned into a dumping ground for surplus earth moving machinery, including the super bulldozer and its brother, a 200-ton super grader. By the end of May 2012 the dozer had been moved away from the abandoned Acco facility and is now safely stored at a gardening company in the same town, to be preserved and eventually put on display. The Acco Superdozer moved under its own power onto the trailer that took it to the new location.

References

{{Reflist Bulldozers with powerplants larger than 500kW Bulldozers over 100 tonne