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Thirty years ago a man
named Roy LaBounty developed a clawlike contractor's grapple, which
worked at the end of the excavator in place of the bucket. Global
toolmakers have been busy devising more impressive and productive
attachments ever since. A steady parade has rolled forth: Bigger
hammers, breakers, and crushers; tools specialized in hacking concrete,
rebar, and I-beams; and equipment for refining concrete waste are
abundant.
A clear favorite everywhere
is the relative newcomer, the universal processor (UP)—again,
a LaBounty invention. Its beauty is in its variety of interchangeable
jaw sets. The "universal" part of its name comes from
its thoroughgoing versatility. Instead of having to buy multiple
devices for each stage of demolition, you literally can complete
an entire demo job, from pulling down the structure to sizing and
fine-grinding the waste, with a single UP tool. "Just change
out the jaw sets, and away you go," sings Uwe Kausch, product-line
manager of Stanley Tools LaBounty. (Stanley purchased LaBounty's
company and patents some years ago.) Depending on the specific brand
you buy, you can add pincers, pulverizers,
shears, combi-cutters, wood cleavers, plate shears, and many others
for metal and concrete shearing and for concrete cracking, crushing,
and pulverizing. Ups range from small models—for example, LaBounty's
UP 15—to large models, including the UP 75 and the UP 100.
Steps between include machines at 20, 25, 30, and 45, roughly corresponding
to the excavator sizes driving them. Powering a UP, you can also
do remarkable finesse demolition, such as snipping the concrete
from a building's floors, walls, and foundations and moving it to
the processor.
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Shear Power
LaBounty's largest specialty metal shears—the 100 model—can
sever a 7/8-in. steel I-beam 24 in. long, reports Mike Morrison,
equipment-division manager of Brandenburg Industrial Service in
Chicago, IL. Shear blades are arranged within a 6-in.-wide cutting
jaw; after you finish with these, you can mount another 6-in.-wide
jaw for cracking concrete. These bite down very hard and cut surprisingly
thick slabs "like a pair of scissors," says Morrison.
You can remove whole sections of a concrete structure intact, if
need be. He finds they're ideal for removing 8- or 10-ft. sections
of parapets from bridgeheads and moving them elsewhere for cracking
and pulverizing. Or use the UP to probe hidden or buried formations,
adds Brandenburg Vice President Bill Moore, who is also president
of the National Association of Demolition Contractors (NADC). "You
can dig around the wall with an excavator, then crunch down on it
with the UP," he says. "It's kind of like Pac-Man going
through a concrete floor. We'll actually bite right through horizontal
floors of a building with a shear attachment." It's so powerful
that Brandenburg crews often don't even need to switch to the concrete
jaws, as steel shears work better.
Similar "breakthroughs"
are occurring with bigger and tougher hydraulic hammers, assorted
breakers, and stand-alone concrete crushers. LaBounty's pioneering
name still seems to predominate in many sectors and is cited "generically"
throughout the following discussion. Don't overlook the strong lineup
of high-quality competitors, however, which can be found in every
category. Naturally, contractors seem to settle on personal favorites,
which are often particularly suited to a market niche or size. Too,
each user seems to have devised some innovative tool-based strategies,
discovered new applications, or established his likes and dislikes.
NADC Executive Director Mike Taylor steered us to several leading
demolition operators to complement the comments made by some grading
and excavation contractors who do demo as a sideline. Here's an
assortment of tips, pointers, and suggestions from a chorus of users
praising their tool favorites.
A Swivel-Headed Cat
MP That Purrs
Mark Ryan, president of Carl Bolander & Sons Company in St.
Paul, MN, uses the full spectrum of tools working for underground
utilities, building earth retention systems, pile driving, and doing
demolition. A year ago he purchased Caterpillar's MP30 multiprocessor
(an equivalent to the LaBounty UP). Ryan exalts, "It was the
first tool we ever bought that has a swivel, and we really like
this machine." He mounts it on a Cat 350 excavator or a backhoe,
and he most often fits it with shear blades. When we telephoned
him, Ryan's crews were weeding out many older structures on the
nearby campus of the 3M Company. 3M wanted to remove only certain
buildings while preserving other structures nearby; it was hardly
a job for the tall crane and a free-swinging ball. The processor
was ideal.
Before he bought the
MP 30, Ryan comparison-shopped at a ConExpo, where he evaluated
competing designs, including LaBounty's. What sold him on the Cat
was its faster cycling time for the jaws action and its enclosed
main cylinder, which suggested it would suffer less damage.
Ryan also fields two
Cat excavators primarily as wrecking tools—a 235 and a 325—and
runs three older LaBounty pulverizers mounted on Cat 245s. The LaBounty
products don't rotate, but he's found that they can still really
process the material.
For Bolander's president—as
for most of the contractors interviewed—onsite concrete recycling
has become a critical need and thus a major factor in tool strategizing.
Ryan, who is also a director of the NADC, launched into recycling
two years ago. To beef up his capabilities, he recently bought an
Extec concrete crusher on tracks. He's extremely pleased. "It's
not exactly an attachment for an excavator," he admits, but
it's a versatile, mobile recycling plant that deserves mentioning
anyway, he adds.
How about hammers and
breakers—any favorites here? "No, I don't have much to
say about hammers," Ryan answers. "Nothing earth-shattering."
Apocalypse Now and
Then
Kroeker Inc.'s Jeff Kroeker in Fresno, CA, does demolitions for
cities, utility companies, highway departments, military bases,
and general contractors. In such demo work, meeting your production
schedule is especially critical because other subs usually are lined
up to do site prep and other tasks as soon as you finish. In order
to do your job efficiently, he advises, "Use the right tools
that can complete the work quickly." Smaller, inexperienced
contractors sometimes bring undersized or underpowered bargain-basement
tools wholly mismatched for the task. "If you don't use the
right artillery," Kroeker observes, "your work crews will
[struggle]." As a result the overall project timetables will
bog down.
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Kroeker's military metaphor
is apt because recent demo projects have included knocking down
750 homes at the Naval Air Station in Lemoore, CA; razing another
352 housing units at Fort Ord near Monterey Bay; and leveling a
few warehouses at Vandenberg and Edwards Air Force Bases. The company
"arsenal" bristles with all the standard equipment: LaBounty
shears, multiple brands of hammers, portable recycling equipment
from Eagle Crusher, a LaBounty UP, a Morbark 1300 pebble grinder,
a Peterson horizontal grinder, and Morbark large tree shears. He
says the latter is an amazing tool. "You can whittle your way
down the largest of the stumps that you come across—then throw
them through your tub grinder." Result: no more tree.
Kroeker purchased his
first UP, a model 70, in 1994, when the tool was so new that only
two others were being used in California. "It's a workhorse,"
he rhapsodizes. He still uses it routinely. "I'm looking out
my window watching it work right now. It's been a good product."
Kroeker eventually backed it up with another, the UP 30.
As an NADC board member
and chairman of the recycling committee, he's generally "amazed"
with hydraulic attachments, and he loves what they can do. In a
typical job, for instance, he can bolt a UP onto a backhoe stick
to snip out the iron bars or beams in a building and cut the steel
to size for further processing. Then after a quick change, the UP
jaws can be put to work pulverizing concrete. His men can crunch
up the foundations or the columns and size the concrete for recycling
and removal by feeding bite-size chunks into his onsite Eagle Crusher
1400 or his UMO 4 secondary crusher. Crews also haul away the scrap
to various destinations with his armada of 250 rolloff boxes.
Rarely does Kroeker ever
rent tools, finding that what's available usually isn't big or plentiful
enough. A smaller operator who performs only occasional demo work
or one just starting out, however, might find renting necessary—assuming
he's able to select and find the right tools.
Bringing Down the
House
Farther south from Kroeker's market area, the work portfolio of
CM Resources in Fountain Valley, CA, also runs an interesting gamut
of demolition and excavating. Among his recent contracts, President
John Mershimer mentions the dismantling of the Long Beach Naval
Shipyard. And when we telephoned him in midsummer, his crews were
wreaking destruction on housing units at the Marine Corps's 29 Palms
base in the Mojave Desert. Lightly made stucco and wood dwellings
were succumbing to a JRV smasher mounted on a Komatsu PC 400 hydraulic
excavator—a combination Mershimer has been using very happily
for years. He likes the multifunction JRV; it's a "smashing"
add-on tool, for all the familiar reasons: It can separate the concrete
and steel or accommodate a wider jaw or a blade for cutting rebar.
"If you've got a piece hung up, it will cut right through it,"
he says.
Mershimer's current favorite
is probably his LaBounty second-member rotational shear, model MSD
40R. "It has turned out to be a really, really nice shear,"
he says. "It's very versatile and multifunctional. I can use
it not only for shearing but for tearing buildings down." Above
all, he likes not having to detach the excavator boom in order to
connect it, as is required with some other shears. He reports that
it goes on just like any regular attachment and gives him a dozen
feet of extra reach too. By contrast, to use his 70R shears he must
remove and then reattach the arm, adding considerable extra work
and time.
As for breaker preferences,
his current favorite is a Soosam. "They are very powerful hammers,"
he says, more so than his Teledyne. The Soosam "will walk circles
around" the latter and shows plenty of durability. For Mershimer,
hydraulic hammers and tools in general—as opposed to mechanical
or hybrid ones—are the only way to go. "I pretty much
run only hydraulic now," he says.
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Getting Concrete Results
Also at Long Beach, recently laboring to replace some of the port's
civilian Pier T terminals, are machines and crews from Cleveland
Wrecking Company, an old-line firm now based in Covina, CA, with
locations in Oakland, CA; Cincinnati, OH; Buffalo, NY; Houston,
TX; and Tampa, FL. When we called in July, an excavator-and-breaker
combo was hammering three mammoth piers made of approximately 180,000
yd.3 of concrete. The work was going smoothly, said President Jim
Sheridan. "It's not a standard demo job by any means. We're
locked at the hip with the general contractor on it." Cleveland
has to tightly coordinate the joint task of detaching and moving
the massive dock sections from the water to dry land. "Our
crews are shearing the piles and picking the caps so that the general
is allowed to come and pick them up," he explains. It's truly
a joint amphibious operation; still another contractor's derrick
barge cranes are positioned to pick up chunks of the old pier and
put them ashore, where Cleveland crews are saw-cutting the slabs
and hydrohammering. Breakers descend for crunching, removing the
rebar, and completing the recycling.
Cleveland's stockpile
of tools includes the usual array of breakers and hammers, and Sheridan
finds no favorites among them. Rather, he points out the tremendous
punishment they take and their short lifespan of only four years
or so—making hammers seem almost like throwaway items. He's
far more impressed by the durability and product innovation he's
been seeing in new versions of concrete crushers. He recalls that
before they came along, all that was available was a jaw and cone.
"But now they've come up with impact crushers. They've done
wonders in the crushing industry over the last five years,"
he says admiringly. On some work sites, Sheridan parks an Eagle
Crusher portable recycler, but more typically he subs out this task
to specialists or hauls the detritus to a recycling plant.
Up the coastline, Sheridan's
firm also does recurring bust-up work at Los Angeles International
Airport (LAX). Slabs are slabs, so to speak, being basically the
same everywhere; however, the challenge of cracking up thousands
of yards at a busy airport differs radically from dismantling them
at an old waterfront. For one thing, he notes, underground fuel
lines and other restrictions preclude violent "stomping"
demolition procedures at LAX and prohibit using any free-falling
objects. Hence, Sheridan always ends up using excavator- or backhoe-mounted
hydraulic breakers. Another alternative is costly saw-cutting of
slabs into 12- x 12-ft. squares. These can be left in place so that
traffic can still roll along until the blocks are lifted out sometime
later. Alternatively, after saw cutting he might hammer a "chase
perimeter" indentation around the circumference, rendering
the surface impassible, so that blocks must be grappled up and removed
right away.
Such care is needed at
LAX or anywhere an owner needs to save the substrate for resurfacing.
On less critical surfaces, like some highway repaving jobs, Sheridan's
preferred tool is a "mega-stomper"—a free-falling
destructive force delivered by a plate up to 8 ft. wide and 4 in.
thick, descending from about 10 ft. up.
Hitting Pay Dirt
An illustration of a similar slab-smashing alternative popped up
at a job site on the same coastline, in Seattle, WA, where Gary
Merlino Construction Co. Inc. was busting up airport taxiways at
Seattle-Tacoma Airport (Sea-Tac). Merlino's superintendent, Dave
Zimmerman, notes that slab thickness there ranges from 14- up to
18- or 19 in., making the demolition challenge one that isn't normally
considered easy. For one thing, he points out, "you can't make
a bucket beefy enough to break it up. The surface will just beat
the hell out of it." Moreover, he notes that trying to pull
the concrete out of there by saw cutting would make the chunks too
big and tear up the machine too. Using hydraulic hammers is precluded
by airport officials leery of scattering fragments across heavily
used surfaces.
The solution? Merlino
deployed a little-known attachment tool called a Surestrike, model
4000. Zimmerman mated this with the end of a Cat 988 loader. As
a demo tool, Surestrike's chief virtue is that when unleashed against
a hard surface under the right conditions, it can crush to bits
a rather large area in record time. For example, a small room-size
surface of 100 ft.2 can be shattered into easily manageable chunks
in about five minutes, says Zimmerman. An area the size of a football
field might be pulverized in just one day. (And we're talking about
very thick concrete.) By comparison, he says, saw cuts would require
several days and are much more costly, being billed by the per-inch
foot.
The mechanical principle
behind Surestrike is as basic as gravity itself. Positioned within
a tower 24 ft. high, a strap lifts a heavy weight, then releases
it on a free fall for a distance of about 15 ft. to strike a heavy
bit. BOOM!—one badly cracked piece of concrete runway,
rock, or roadway. The mechanism reloads and fires at the rate of
about three times per minute and thus has a relatively quiet and
unobtrusive noise factor, at least compared to big-time hydrohammering.
At Sea-Tac, Zimmerman
broke the taxiway into panels of about 20- x 20 ft., subdivided
these into thirds or quarters with this headache-maker, then lifted
them from the rubble and put them on the nearby surfaces, to be
trounced further.
How would Zimmerman have
accomplished the Seac-Tac job without a Surestrike? With greater
difficulty, he says. "You'd just have to dice it up with hammers."
He notes that to contain the flying debris, you would have to surround
the work area with fencing. "It would be really expensive."
He praises Surestrike: "It's an interesting machine, I'll tell
you that. It works well!"
No Bridge Too Far
Land-improvement contractor Greg Jueneman of Orval Jueneman Dozer
Service in Hanover, KS, finds bridge demolition a technically intriguing
sideline to his main earthmoving work. Each year, 15 or 20 Kansas
bridges succumb to his mechanized workers, after which he grinds
the rubble for use in regrading the riverbanks for new spans. Jueneman's
tool of choice? An NPK hydraulic hammer—either his 10 XB or
his 16 XB. "Bigger is better," he observes, referring
to the respective breakout force. Demolition time saved is always
money earned
A key to doing bridges efficiently is to attach the heaviest hammer
to the biggest excavator or backhoe that the bridge pier can withstand.
With an oversized machine, he says, you're struggling with too much
weight, but if you become timid and deploy a small machine, "it
seems like you're out there forever trying to hammer the concrete
apart." Jueneman's midsize solution is usually his 20-ton PC
200 trackhoe sporting a very heavy-duty 25-ft. boom—a muscular
necessity for maneuvering 10-ft.-long hammers.
Along with his NPKs,
Jueneman owns a Rockram but relies on the two heavy hitters from
Japan more frequently. "The NPK seems to really hang in there,"
he says. He notes that it has more breakout force and a superior
cushioning setup, which absorbs the shock better. "It keeps
the trackhoe itself from vibrating a lot and keeps joints from wearing
out too quickly." Jueneman estimates that he cumulatively racks
up about 1,500 hours on the hammering trio.
Jueneman's usual bridge-wrecking
strategy begins by positioning the trackhoe properly. "If a
ravine is deep, we'll run the machine out to the pier but not beyond
it." Doing so provides better safety and stability. Once in
place, the hammer can start pounding. This is soon followed by yanking
out the concrete beams below or cutting the steel I-beams with a
torch, one section at a time. For lifting and loading debris along
soggy riverbanks, a good combo is a grapple bucket and thumb attached
to a track-type skid-steer.
The work requires frequent
switching from hammer to bucket and back. Jueneman experimented
with one quick-attachment system touting a tool-change time of just
five minutes. But he eventually discarded the system in order to
avoid the coupler's load restrictions. Now he relies on crews to
change buckets and hammer pins, which requires about 20 minutes.
He says at the top of
his tool wish list is "a better way to cut steel," noting
that older bridge rebar, I-beams (up to 30 in. long and with 1-in.-thick
steel), and rivet heads are really thick. Some beams are 50 or 60
ft. in length, with saturation-welded ends. Removal of these parts
means firing up the acetylene torch and adding one or two days to
the job. Concrete culverts and many bridge beams are valuable commodities,
however, if they're carefully extracted and sold as salvage rather
than being destroyed. "In that respect, it pays to use a torch
and carefully remove them and keep them in good shape," he
says.
Two Thumbs Up
While bucket thumbs aren't exactly new, you may not appreciate their
power and versatility until you've used one, says Operations Manager
Alex Swayze of Wesley Corp. in Las Vegas, NV. Recently he added
one thumb to his Hitachi 750 excavator bucket, transforming it into
a clawlike pincer, then followed with another for a Cat excavator,
which he put to use razing 70 multifamily apartments nearby. "It
can grab a lot more material, and it's more productive," says
Swayze. For the recent housing job, his men could grasp the tops
of vertical support elements and rooftops, then pull them down into
a tightly contained pile of rubble. "[The thumbed bucket] lets
you be very selective in what you want to pick up," he says
appreciatively.
This thumb-and-bucket
combo effectively creates a battering ram. "You can do some
really hard demolition with it," he states. Then it can morph
into a very nifty cleanup tool. The bucket—now a "hand"—can
grab and load the debris or condense the pile for further munching,
he says. Loading debris into rolloff boxes is also a cinch: Instead
of scooping splinted 2x4s and crumbling cinderblock into the bucket
(and watching half the contents spill as it jerks upward), using
the thumb is "like grabbing a big handful of debris."
Whenever the operator wants his bucket back as a pure excavator,
he can mechanically pull the thumb out of his way.
The thumb is perhaps
a fitting conclusion to this roundup because in a sense it's really
a very bright variation on Roy LaBounty's contractor's grapple that
started it all—only now it preserves rather than replaces the
bucket. As any current observer of demolition will tell you, grapples
and thumbed buckets are pervasive for cleanup work. Comments Sales
Manager Mike Smith of Coastline Equipment in the Los Angeles basin,
"Basically they are eliminating machines like expensive, big
crawler-loaders." Compared to the heavy, tracked vehicle scooping
up debris and pouring it over the side of a truck, grapples work
much faster. "You can position the excavator close to the sized
material," he says, "then run a line of trucks underneath.
The claws grab the material, swing it over, and set it into the
truck. It's very efficient." It also puts you in a better position
to sort materials for recycling.
Pricing Mechanisms
What will this Swiss Army–style assortment of tools cost you?
List prices for the most raved-about products are very steep, notes
Smith, especially if the products are used only occasionally (and
in comparison with the price of the excavators needed to drive them).
A few examples: LaBounty's smallest model, UP 15, carries a list
price of $43,000; a set of concrete-cracking jaws for it will cost
you $12,350, and shears are $14,500. At the more powerful end, a
UP 75 lists at $96,000; concrete-cracking jaws rise to $34,800,
pulverizer molars will run another $42,400, and shears are $48,700,
notes Smith.
Tool rental, per se,
seems a rarity in Coastline's market, says Smith; rather he will
bundle the tool—say, a big set of LaBounty shears—with
a large excavator to match.
More affordable than
UPs are contractor's grapples, starting with the LaBounty 100 HDR
at $11,500. A 110 model comes in at $16,000, and a 120 costs $19,650.
Again, the model sizes roughly correspond to the excavator sizes.
Excavator-driven hammer
prices usually reflect power output measured in foot-pounds. A small
hammer rated at 1,500 ft.-lb., such as the Stanley MB 20, will run
$21,500. Stanley's MB 30 (2,000 ft.-lb.) costs $26,500, the MB 40
(3,000 ft.-lb.) is $39,450, an MB 50EX model (5,000 ft.-lb.) costs
$50,500, and the maximum-size 100EX for a 120,000-lb. excavator
costs $94,600. Again, these are suggested retail prices, and market
pricing varies.
Tool operation itself
is consistently praised as being straightforward and requiring no
real formal training, notes LaBounty's Kausch. "Operators can
look at our manuals to see how they work. Although these tools in
general have changed a lot [in their look and functionality since
the '70s and '80s], their operation and how you use them hasn't
really changed. Most guys have seen them working or have some experience—or
can pick it up fairly quickly."
La Mesa, CA—based
writer David Engle specializes in construction-related topics.
GEC - January/February 2004
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