These Are a Few of My Fa-vo-rite Tools! Excavator Attachments Are Grappling With Reality
Jan. 1, 2004
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.
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.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.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 earnedA 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.”
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.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.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 earnedA 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.”
