2 products

Excavator Plate Compactors

A plate compactor is the perfect attachment for your mini excavator when you have small to mid size jobs to complete. The extended reach of an excavator combined with a powerful auxiliary hydraulic system makes it the perfect machine for compacting.

What is an Excavator Plate Compactor?

Blue Diamond Excavator Compactor Plate Attachment

A plate compactor for your excavator is an attachment that couples to the arm of your excavator and is used to compact and prepare the earth for sidewalks, driveways, street repairs and everything in-between.

Compacting the earth in these situations helps to stabilize the ground and prevent shifting later on.

A plate compactor attachment uses both the weight of the attachment and excavator arm to compress the soil, as well as high frequency vibrations. This is very similar action to an excavator post pounder driving posts into the ground.

Your mini excavators auxiliary hydraulic system is used to operate a hydraulic motor that transmits vibrational forces to a large plate sitting on the surface.

How To Choose The Right Plate Compactor For Your Excavator

Compactor plate in action on an excavator from Blue Diamond.

Ensuring that you choose the right plate compactor attachment for your excavator’s weight will ensure you get the most out of your new investment.

Purchasing too heavy of an attachment may prevent you from being able to use your plate compactor with the excavators arm fully extended. For example, Blue Diamond’s C310 model of plate compactor is designed for excavators that weigh between 5,000 and 12,000 pounds.

Check the max oil flow and max psi for your plate compactor as well. Matching these requirements with your excavators auxiliary hydraulics is important to ensuring the maximum service life of the attachment and host machine.

The vibrations per minute or Hz Frequency of the plate compactor is also an important consideration. A higher rate of vibrations per minute works best with thin layers of material, while a lower vibrations per minute is useful for thicker layers of material.

Blue Diamond’s plate compactor has a “35 Hz” Frequency which equates to about 2100 vibrations per minute.