Free equipment inspection checklist
A printable daily walkaround for excavators and heavy equipment, and an Excel log for the fleet. No email, no signup, no watermark.
Written for machines, not for a filing cabinet
The walkaround is split the way an operator actually does it: everything you check with your feet on the ground, then everything you check once it is running. Undercarriage and track tension, coupler locked, hoses weeping, DEF, steps clear of mud, drift under load. Three boxes per line, OK, NO, and not applicable, because half the list does not apply to half the fleet.
The Excel log is the fleet view: one row per machine per day, with hour meter, whether it was safe to operate, what was found, who it was reported to and when it was cleared. That last column is the one an investigator looks at first, because a defect logged and never cleared is the row nobody wants to explain.
The failure is not the missing inspection
It is the ticked box. A form long enough to be thorough is a form that gets completed in the cab without anyone walking round the machine, and that is worse than no form at all, because now there is a signed record saying somebody looked.
This one is deliberately short for that reason. If a machine needs more than this, it needs a mechanic rather than a longer checklist. The related thinking on machine cost is in equipment cost per hour, and on the safety side there is a free toolbox talk template as well.
Common questions
A walkaround before you start and a function check once it is running. On the ground: leaks under the machine, undercarriage or tires, the bucket and coupler, hoses and cylinders, fluid levels, glass and mirrors, ROPS and seat belt, steps and handholds clear, guards secure, extinguisher, lights. In the seat: warning lights out, brakes holding, controls responding, all hydraulic functions with no unexpected drift, backup alarm and horn, and anything that sounds or smells wrong. That is the whole thing, and it takes a few minutes.
Five minutes on a machine you know, longer on one you have not run before or one that came back from a rental yard. If it is taking twenty, either something is wrong with the machine or the form is padded. A checklist nobody has time for gets ticked in the cab without anyone leaving the seat, which is worse than not having one.
Write it down, then decide. Not everything grounds a machine: a cracked mirror and a soft brake are not the same finding. What matters is that the defect is recorded, somebody is told, and if it is not safe the machine is tagged out rather than quietly used anyway. The form has a defects box and a reported-to line for exactly that, because a defect found and written down is a repair, and a defect found and not written down is an incident waiting for a date.
Because it is the only honest input to two things you care about. Service intervals stop being a guess, and machine hours per job become real numbers you can cost with rather than an estimate at the end of the month. It is one field and it is the one people skip.
Yes. No email, no signup, no watermark. Print it, change it, put your own logo on it. We make software for contractors and we would rather you knew we exist; that is the whole arrangement.
Paper works until the paper is in the machine that left
TrackOver runs the inspection from the phone, keeps it against the machine and the job it was on, and turns the hour meter into real service intervals and real machine cost. Free plan, no card.