UK contractor claims to have doubled productivity with new twin-boom excavator.
Demolition contractors are renowned for their innovative approach to equipment use. But, even by those standards, the new twin-boom excavator in the Armac Group fleet is really pushing the envelope.
The company claims the machine was developed in response to the need for higher levels of productivity. “We carried out extensive time and motion studies and we realised that we were losing valuable productivity each time the machine had to slew to another location,” says Armac’s Adrian McLean. “So we approached Hitachi and worked with them to develop this new twin-boom arrangement.”
McLean reports that the new machine has almost doubled productivity levels although he says the development has not been without its problems. “One of the key issues we’ve had to address is making sure that the operators are good friends. The first pair we put on it hated each other and would slew each time their opposite number was about to start work. If anything, that probably halved our output,” McLean says. “In addition, the position of the twin cabs means that the operators are breathing exhaust fumes almost non-stop for the entire day. So we now have two operators that like each other enough to work side-by-side but who are expendable.”
McLean adds that the hydraulics of the machine have been downgraded to avoid what he describes as “the helicopter effect”. “During initial trials, we had a really big, powerful hydraulic pump driving the slew motion,” he says. “But during fast turns, the operators claimed that the machine would rise slightly above the ground, hover, and only settle when the slewing motion had ceased.”
Although he refuses to be drawn on the speculation, rumours suggest that Armac has a set of high reach front end equipment for this machine but has yet to find a set of neighboring tower blocks in need of demolition.
So isn’t McLean concerned about utilisation levels. “We looked into the utilisation levels very closely before making this financial commitment, and it’s true to say that the machine works so quickly that it is often stood idle waiting for the other supporting equipment to catch up,” he concludes. “But we have recently been approached by the Highways Agency who believe the machine is ideally suited to reinstatement work at T-junctions.”
