Machine Frame Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
- 71.4% of all 147 records sit with just five assignees, so most structural-fatigue claim space around track frames and boom weldments is already staked out by a handful of heavy-equipment makers.
- B62D dominates at 66.7% of records, but E02F earthmoving claims run in parallel at 34.7% — the two overlap heavily in undercarriage and upper-structure designs rather than sitting in separate silos.
- Peak filing year so far is 2024 with 10 records, a reminder that the 2025-2026 counts in the trend are still filling in given the roughly 18-month publication lag.
Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 147 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this dataset covers
This landscape tracks patent filings at the intersection of track frame, boom weldment and excavator upper-structure design with fatigue-specific evidence: stress concentration, load spectrum measurement, weld toe cracking, strain gauge measurement, finite element validation and repair welding. It spans 147 published records from 2015 through the 2026-07-31 cut-off, ranked across 38 assignees and drawing on receiving-office data from Europe, the United States, China, Japan, Italy and Germany.
The scope is deliberately narrow: it is not every undercarriage patent, but the subset where a structural-fatigue method or failure mode is explicitly claimed alongside the frame or weldment structure. That narrowing is why the assignee list concentrates as hard as it does — this is claim space that a small number of construction-equipment makers have been actively defending for years, not a broad mechanical-design category.
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Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 147 records: how filing activity has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses the claims actually sit in.
Filing trend
Filing activity peaked so far at 10 records in 2024. With fewer than four complete years available once the roughly 18-month publication lag is accounted for, a growth rate is not computable from this trend — treat the most recent one to two years as undercounted rather than as a slowdown.
IPC subclass composition
B62D (motor vehicles and steering) covers 66.7% of the 147 records, and E02F (excavating and earth moving) covers 34.7% — the two classes overlap on many records rather than partitioning the field. Smaller clusters in B66C, B60C, B61F, B60G, F16F and A01D show where fatigue methods have been extended into cranes, tyres, rail bogies, suspension, dampers and harvesting equipment, each in the low single digits of the record total.
Shares are the percentage of the 147 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Machine Frame and Structural Fatigue with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about machine frame and structural fatigue and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaMost-cited records and a representative filing
US7997619B2 — Track frame for work machine (Kubota Corporation, 2011-08-16)
A track frame designed to avoid stress concentration caused by a work load while increasing strength, achieved by reducing the weight of connection legs and providing sufficient welding length at the joint surfaces. Front and rear pairs of left and right connection legs join a center frame to the side frames, with each connection leg formed as a tubular body joined at a center joint part.Abstract text abridged from the published filing.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US3435908A | Articulated crawler tractor construction | 65 |
| 2 | US7552785B2 | Suspension system for track vehicle | 53 |
| 3 | US7481289B2 | Swiveling work machine | 39 |
| 4 | US8070241B2 | Track chain joint with rotatable pin | 32 |
| 5 | US7500532B2 | Swiveling work machine | 31 |
| 6 | US20050210717A1 | Swiveling work machine | 31 |
| 7 | US7503419B2 | Backhoe | 28 |
| 8 | US20110049975A1 | Track Chain Joint With Rotatable Pin | 23 |
| 9 | US7293375B2 | Crawler frame for construction machine | 23 |
| 10 | US20060001250A1 | Main frame for construction machines and method of manufacturing the same | 17 |
Citation counts reflect influence within this searched corpus and favour older filings; they are not a measure of current commercial relevance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →What the numbers mean for a filing decision
Read alongside the assignee ranking and IPC composition, three patterns stand out for anyone deciding where to file next or who to watch.
The top of the field is tightly held
Five assignees hold 105 of the 147 records in scope, and the top ten extend that to 91.2%. New entrants are filing into a field where the leading construction-equipment makers have already built dense prior art around track frame and boom weldment fatigue claims.
Vehicle and earthmoving claims overlap, not separate
Because a record can carry multiple IPC classes, the fact that B62D and E02F shares sum past 100% shows most track-frame fatigue claims are drafted to read on both the vehicle-structure and excavating-machinery classifications at once.
Influence sits with older filings
The most-cited records in this corpus date back decades — articulated crawler tractor and swiveling work-machine patents accumulate citations because they are older, not necessarily because they remain the technically dominant approach today.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to machine frame and structural fatigue, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who holds the claim space, and where it thins out
The ranking covers all 38 assignees the data endpoint returns for this search — not a top-50 or top-100 cut, the complete ranked set for this scope.
A single leader well ahead of fifth place
The top-ranked assignee holds 34 records against 10 for the fifth-place company, a gap wide enough that the leader's filing choices around track frame and stress-concentration claims effectively set the boundaries other filers design around.
Joint filings cluster around a small set of partnerships
Only 10 co-assignee pairs appear in this dataset, and the strongest pair shares 15 records — a signal of an established joint-development relationship between two of the leading construction-equipment groups rather than a broad pattern of co-filing across the field.
Recent-year counts read low across the board
Every one of the leading assignees shows zero records in the latest year in the momentum data. Given the roughly 18-month publication lag, this reads as an artefact of recent filings not yet publishing rather than the leaders stepping back from this claim space.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Kubota Corporation | 0 | — |
| Komatsu Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Hitachi Construction Machinery Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Clark Equipment Co. | 0 | — |
| Komatsu Utility Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Deere & Co. | 0 | — |
| Compagnie Générale des Établissements Michelin | 0 | — |
| Caterpillar SARL | 0 | — |
Where to take this next
The dataset points to a concentrated core and a thinner set of adjacent branches. Two directions are worth pursuing depending on whether the goal is freedom-to-operate or identifying open claim space.
Map freedom-to-operate against the top five
With 71.4% of records held by five assignees, any new track-frame or boom-weldment filing should be checked claim-by-claim against that concentrated set before drafting, not just searched at the keyword level.
Run a freedom-to-operate check in EurekaTest the under-claimed branches
The smaller IPC clusters in rail bogies, suspension, cranes and dampers show fatigue methods extended outside the core equipment types at low filing density — worth validating whether that is open space or simply unexplored.
Explore white space in EurekaCommon questions about this landscape
The ranking in this dataset covers 38 assignees, with the leading company holding 34 of the 147 records in scope and the fifth-place company holding 10. That gap means the leader's granted claims effectively define the boundaries that other construction-equipment makers file around for track frame and boom weldment fatigue methods. It is worth checking that leader's portfolio specifically before drafting new claims in this space, rather than relying on a keyword search alone.
B62D covers motor vehicles and steering and appears on 66.7% of the 147 records, while E02F covers excavating and earth moving and appears on 34.7%. Because a single patent record can carry both classifications, most track-frame fatigue claims are drafted to read on the vehicle-structure classification and the excavating-machinery classification simultaneously. This overlap matters for classification-based prior art searches: searching only one subclass will miss a meaningful share of relevant filings.
The trend data shows a peak so far of 10 records in 2024, but a reliable growth rate is not computable from this dataset because fewer than four complete years remain once the roughly 18-month publication lag is factored in. The apparent drop-off toward 2025-2026 is very likely a publication-lag artefact rather than a real slowdown in filing. Anyone using this trend for forecasting should treat the most recent one to two years as understated.
The smaller IPC clusters point to it: B61F (railway bogies), B60G (suspension), B66C (cranes), B60C (tyres) and F16F (springs and dampers) each account for only a few percent of the 147 records, compared with 66.7% for B62D. That suggests fatigue-measurement and weld-repair methods proven on track frames and boom weldments have not been heavily extended into these adjacent structural applications yet, which is where a first-claim opportunity is more plausible than in the crowded core.
US7997619B2, assigned to Kubota Corporation and dated 2011-08-16, is a useful reference point: it claims a track frame structure designed to avoid stress concentration from work loads by reducing the weight of connection legs while providing sufficient welding length at the joint surfaces between the connection legs and the center and side frames. It is representative of the field's dominant approach — combining a structural-geometry claim with an explicit stress-concentration rationale — rather than a fatigue-measurement method claim on its own.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.