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Want to improve your grading and excavating productivity? How about expanding the scope of your business? If so, it might be time to add a specialty attachment or two to your equipment lineup. By Greg Northcutt |
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Buckets and blades might be foremost in your choice of attachments to make money in your grading and excavating business. But that doesn’t mean they’re the only tools with the potential to boost revenue. Depending on your market and goals, special-purpose attachments could also pay off by increasing the versatility and profitability of your prime machines, whether they’re excavators, dozers, loaders, or other tool carriers. These specialty attachments might enhance your grading and excavating capabilities, boosting your overall productivity and spreading the costs of your tool carrier over more units of work. That’s called efficiency—a key foundation of profit. Specialty attachments could also open the door to new lines of work by providing a more economical way to take on a particular type of job when the volume of work doesn’t justify the cost of a much more expensive, higher-production, single-purpose piece of equipment. That also makes more efficient use of your resources. Firsthand Experience In his case, what he had was a Cat 140G motor grader. What he needed was a way to crush and compact pit-run material when setting down a road sub-base. So instead of trying to scrape up the money to pay for machinery designed solely for milling and compacting work, the city spent much less to buy a crusher/compactor attachment that hung on the ripper bar of the motor grader. Made by Mountain West Attachments in Logan, the 2,680-lb. Crusher features 19 interlocking 21-in.-diameter steel crusher rings that fracture, score, and blend materials. The quick-mounted unit, with an effective crushing width of 76.5 in., pins onto the ripper beam of a motor grader in place of the shanks. It can be transported attached to the motor grader, eliminating the need for a trailer. “At 10 miles per hour, the Crusher rings can deliver impact blows up to 25,000 pounds to crush large rocks or slabs of asphalt or concrete to 1.5- [inch-] minus aggregate and to compact to 100% plus,” says Jeremy Jenkins, the company’s sales manager. “This attachment allows you to use just one machine—a motor grader—to prepare or redo a road base. It crushes, blends, and compacts the material as you’re grading. Direction of travel has no effect on productivity of the attachment. By processing onsite materials, this attachment can reduce the amount of gravel or other fill that has to be brought in and the amount of material to be hauled off and discarded as waste.” In addition to being pulled parallel to the ripper beam, the crusher attachment can be mounted so that it is angled right or left. This position increases the tool’s bite to improve blending action. “That can be useful in certain applications, involving mixing of harder materials, like when using the attachment after ripping up a gravel road that’s been treated with a dust suppressant,” he notes. “It’s a very
versatile tool and works well on smaller new-construction and repair
projects,” says Hadfield. “The sub-base materials we used
were straight out of the bank without any processing. We’d
end up with material ranging from 8- to 10-inch-diameter stone down
to sands. The Crusher breaks the stones easily, crushing larger
material down to as small as 1.5-inch gravel, and compacts it.” Eliminating the need for large, dedicated equipment, such as a milling machine, also reduced traffic-control costs, he notes. For details about the Crusher, call 888/904-5284 or go on-line at www.mwattachments.com. A Growing Demand
“In the past few years, there’s been a huge increase in sales of attachments in general,” reports Bill Douglas, president of attachment maker Kenco Corporation in Ligonier, PA. Contractors in North America, he notes, are following the lead of their counterparts in Europe. Everything in the construction equipment market is attachment-oriented,” he says. “When they pull a machine, usually an excavator, onto a job site, it has to do a lot of tasks.” Increasingly, that’s likely to require an attachment other than a bucket. “In fact, buckets for loaders and excavators are only a small part of our product line,” Douglas says. The demand for specialized attachments for heavy equipment is bigger than ever, adds Brian Wilson, president of IMAC Design Group Ltd. Based in Edmonton, AB, his company works with other firms around the world to design and manufacture attachments for heavy equipment. “Contractors realize that in order to get the most work out of heavy equipment you need the right tool,” he says. “For example, with the proper attachment at the end of the boom, you can use a hydraulic excavator to lift rock, bury a culvert, or log an urban landscape.” Tool Improvements The more advanced hydraulic systems of the carrier machines are also contributing to the increasing popularity of attachments. “Many manufacturers, especially those who make excavators, are making their machines more attachment-friendly by providing installation kits that minimize the amount of hydraulic components a contractor has to add to run the attachments,” says Bill Papineau, engineering manager for NPK Construction Equipment Inc., a Walton Hills, OH, attachment maker. “Also, many of the new excavator models allow the excavator operator to select the proper hydraulic flow for operating an attachment from inside the cab. In the past, you might have had to open up the engine compartment and use a wrench to adjust the flow to the proper setting.” At the same time, manufacturers continue to make conventional attachments more attractive by improving their performance as well as their reliability and durability. That can reflect minor improvements, such as tighter tolerances and fine-tuning of existing designs, in addition to major advances. Consider hydraulic hammers—a popular attachment for excavators, tractor-loader-backhoes, and large and compact loaders—used to break up a wide range of materials from rocks to structures.
A hydraulic hammer is basically a hydraulically powered reciprocating piston inside of a body. If contaminants get between the piston and the body, they can score the inside diameter of the main body. The only way to fix the damage is to replace the body, an expensive proposition. NPK, however, has developed a line of hydraulic hammers that feature a replaceable liner sleeve to protect the body from damage. “That way, if contaminants enter the hydraulic system, only the sleeves have to be replaced, not the entire body,” says Papineau. “That can reduce repair costs by a factor of five to 10.” Also, the company’s
medium and large hammers use heavy-duty rubber mounts to absorb
shock, recoil, and impulse vibration. This one-piece design eliminates
the need for mechanical springs and extra heavy-mounting brackets.
“Unlike a rigid mount, this isolates the hammer from the machine
it’s mounted on, minimizing wear and tear on the machine and
the operator,” Papineau reports. Other improvements include extra safety features to prevent an attachment from accidentally falling off if a pin-grabbing coupler inadvertently lets go of the tool. IMAC’s Power Wedge coupler, for example, includes three safety features: an arming switch and pilot light in the cab that prevents the operator from accidentally pushing the switch on the joystick that disconnects the attachment from the coupler; a spring-loaded locking device that continues to hold the attachment onto the coupler should the hydraulic line controlling the attachment break; and a safety hook that prevents the attachment from dropping to the ground in the event the other two devices fail.
The Toolmakers “There’s a whole plethora of companies, like ours, that are experts at providing attachments,” says IMAC’s Wilson. “The OEMs aren’t close enough to the market to respond quickly to the needs of contractors. Typically the information that OEMs receive is filtered through multiple layers of bureaucracy, such as a dealer’s field salespeople, branch managers, district managers, and the like. By contrast, if I or one of our salespeople gets wind of a new attachment opportunity, we can take an engineer and a shop guy out in the field to see what’s needed. To survive, attachment manufacturers, like us, have to be more innovative and faster than the OEMs in developing products.” In many cases, it’s a process driven directly by customers, notes Douglas with Kenco. “We’ve developed many of our attachments in response to customers who called us for help in solving a particular problem,” he says. This approach has enabled attachment makers to lead the way in opening up new uses and even new markets for conventional heavy equipment beyond basic dirt work. In the late 1940s, for example, quarries generally used cable-operated shovels to remove rock that had been loosened by blasting. Then Rockland Manufacturing of Bedford, PA, developed the first spade-nose rock bucket to handle shot rock. “Back then, the idea of using wheel loaders in a quarry was a radical idea,” says Tim Davis, the company’s sales manager. “But this bucket proved that wheel loaders could handle shot rock. Today it’s an established practice.” Until Kenco introduced its Barrier Lift attachment 25 years ago, moving concrete median barriers was a slow, cumbersome process involving rods, chains, a helper or two on the ground, and a lifting machine. Using a scissors action to automatically latch onto and release the concrete barriers, this attachment allows the operator of an excavator, a crane, or a wheel loader to handle median barriers—as well as sound walls, curbing, and piling—without additional labor. More recently, IMAC has taken the concept of quickly and easily handling tire and rim assemblies to its highest level yet by developing the largest tire manipulator in the world. Attached to a wheel loader, it allows the operator to lift and turn the 35,000-lb. tire and rim assembly on a mine truck and even break the bead loose using fingertip controls in the cab. Six other models will handle tire and rim assemblies weighing between 4,000 and 30,000 lb. Some of the products being developed by attachment manufacturers aren’t even attachments. Instead they’re designed to improve the use of existing tools. This year, Kenco introduced a telescopic boom kit that replaces the standard boom and dipper stick of an excavator, converting it into a crane. Designed for 30- to 50-mt machines, it’s available in two- or three-section models, in lengths of 40–80 ft. and with capacities of 40,000–80,000 lb. The end result, says Douglas, is a telescopic crane that, unlike a conventional wheel crane, offers the maneuverability and flotation of a track excavator.
Exploring the Choices In the meantime, if you haven’t checked out the market offerings of nontraditional tools for grading and excavation machines, you might be surprised by the available options. One or more of them just might offer you a way to enhance your current operations by adding a new specialty to your line of services. Here’s a sampling: A New Way to Excavate
Rock The attachment has been used for the last 12 years in Australia and features a unique offset design, reports Michael Price, the company’s sales manager. “It’s the only construction saw in the US in which the blade is attached to the motor and housing on just one side,” he says. “That allows you to make a precise, vibration-free boundary cut for cutting a vertical wall or the side of a trench as high or as deep as the boom on your machine can reach.” The tungsten-carbide tips of the armor-plated blade can be replaced quickly and easily, he adds. For more information, phone 303/598-2334 or go on-line at www.rocktoolsinc.com. A Thumb for Backhoes For details call 800/458-3773 or go on-line at www.rocklandmfg.com.
Backfill and Compact
Trenches With One Tool More information is available by phone at 800/225-4379 or on-line at www.npkce.com. Increase Your Grading
Options Details are available by phone at 800/458-3773 or on-line at www.rocklandmfg.com. Process and Recycle
a Range of Materials On-Site The ALLU Power Mixer attachment for excavators in the 25- to 40-ton classes uses a horizontal drum powered by a hydraulic radial-piston motor to process many types of materials in thinly layered sections as deep as 10 ft., depending on the excavator and the flow angle of the material. Applications include mixing in solid or liquid-bulking agents, such as lime or peat, to stabilize soft and wet areas or mixing oxidation or microbial agents with contaminated soils to remediate sites. The bucketlike ALLU SM screener crusher attachment for excavators, wheel loaders, tractor-loader-backhoes, and skid-steer loaders uses a hydraulically powered rotating disc with hammers, crushing bars, and a screen to pulverize and size materials, ranging from soils and bark to construction debris, lightweight concrete, and glass. After the material has been broken up, fines—ranging in size from 1-in. minus to 6-in. minus—are removed by gravity and the remaining material can be dumped as desired. The SM is available in various sizes for light, standard, and heavy-duty applications. For more information, call 800/939-2558 or go on-line at www.allugroup.com. Tools for Easier
Pipe Handling
Details are available by calling 888/848-8288 or going on-line at www.imac.ca. Kenco’s Pipe Hook attachment, available in various sizes to fit all classes of excavators, offers an alternative to cables and slings for handling large concrete pipes. It allows the excavator operator to pick up, lift, and drive concrete pipe up to 12 ft. in diameter and weighing as much as 60,000 lb., depending on OEM excavator capabilities, without any ground helpers. The attachment is shaped like a flattened, elongated C, and the bottom of the C slips inside the pipe. Urethane pads prevent damage to the inside of the pipe and keep it from slipping off when lifted. A sliding lock on the top of the C allows the operator to balance various loads. The tool works with all shapes of pipe, including elliptical, and in narrow trenches and confined areas, the company reports. Call 800/653-6069 for more information or go on-line at www.kenco.com. Simplified Slab
Removal For details, call 800/653-6069 or go on-line at www.kenco.com. Land-Clearing Attachments
“Instead of sending a man with a chain saw into a dangerous pile of blown-down trees to cut off the rootballs and cut logs, you can do the job easier, safer, and faster from the cab with this setup,” says Wilson. “One operator in the cab can grab a tree, saw off the rootball, cut the logs to length, and load them. Then [he can] go back with the bucket to pick up the rootball and shake off the dirt before putting it in a tub grinder.” For more information, call 888/848-8288 or go on-line at www.imac.ca. The Bull Hog brush cutter attachment features a severe-duty fixed-tool hammermill for mowing and mulching brush and trees. Made by Fecon, it fits excavators, track carriers, rubber-tire forestry machines, and high-flow skid-steer loaders. The fixed-tool hammermill has carbide cutting tips with a design life of 300–500 hours and discharges material in line with the carrier for safe operation in populated areas, reports John Heekin, president of the company. “It’s much faster and easier than using chain saws and chippers or large horizontal or tub grinders,” he says. “Also, the unit is more efficient than a swing-tool mill and can handle larger-diameter trees, up to 25 inches. When clearing brush, you mow in one direction and then mulch the material into the soil as you come back in the other direction. For tree removal, you grind through the tree to remove the top and then work your way down the trunk. When that’s done, you finish grinding up the top of the tree.” Details are available by calling 800/528-3113 or going on-line at www.fecon.com. Greg Northcutt is a frequent contributor to Forester Communications publications. GEC - November/December 2003
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