So I am researching things I can do with my Kubota KX040-5 to augment social security. I am considering Demo work. Any suggestions from someone who does demo fulltime? State requirement etc.. I have looked into renting a bigger machine if a job came along that would require more machine that what i have. Renting and dumping dumpsters vs having my own rolloff ? Any and all things I have not thought of which i am sure is considerable Bidding jobs both small and large? Time & Material vs contract? Kind Regards, Joe
There's a lot of unpack here. First of all the biggest thing is insurance. We do commercial site work and every GL carrier we've had in the past 15 years does not like to insure demo - so much so we took the pictures of building demo off our website since insurance companies check your entire 'net footprint. Not saying we try to circumvent insurance coverage we just don't want a quote for our GL to represent building demo when we do very little of it. We can negotiate a % of demo after they quote our GL with no demo. No clue of your state and local requirements as far as licensing, permits, fees and the like goes so no comment on that. For estimating purposes a quick and fast rule of thumb for residential demo with no personal contents in the rooms is 1000SF = 100CY of debris. A typical wood framed home again with no personal contents will average 9 tons per 30 CY roll off. The first 30's will be 5-6 tons since it's the lighter roof and framing materials where the last 30's will average 10-12 tons due to the drywall and fines. For bidding purposes I use 1000SF = 100CY rounding up to the next 30 yard with each 30 averaging 9 tons for disposal purposes. Equipment and time to complete a demo is part experience, art with a little voodoo thrown in.
Do you just have the KX040-5 or do you also have a dump truck or other equipment? A KX040-5 isn't very big for demo. If it has rubber tracks I wouldn't go anywhere near a demo job! If you have to rent a bigger machine and hire a roll off service to haul the material away I don't know if you'd make much if any profit by the time you also include fuel and insurance costs. You also might not get insurance if you have no experience in demo jobs.
I'm on the Board of a very small Town in Vermont. We have a house that collapsed. Owner let it run down, there was a big scandal where it collapsed internally, and 36 dogs were rescued. Criminal charges are pending. The owner died at age 86. His niece got a wreck motor home, lived in it in the driveway for a time. It was a duplex, two apartment, 3500 square foot two story. The executor of the estate has requested bids to demolish the house & clear the lot. Bids have ranged from $15000 to $80000. Each contractor has expressed concern about unseen costs. State authorities and trash companies are divided about the siding which contains asbestos. Some say it is "NON FRIABLE" the asbestos is held in a concrete like binder & won't release fibers into the air. The biggest trash company nearby has reversed themselves as to the cost of disposal. There are other concerns about feces (250 cubic yards), human waste, other trash, lead paint & plumbing. I can't say what the outcome will be. The Town has offered to buy the place. Town officials are divided as to whether the Town should pay for clean up.
My opinion is a small machine like yours is not adequate to make whole house demolition practical. No problem taking it apart with a small machine, but lack of reach places the operator too close to falling debris. The bigger the excavator the better. The greater the skill level of the operator the better.
Agreed a 40 isn't large enough but we use our rubber tracked 279's and 305 mini's all the time on site and building demo projects. Just gotta know how to run them in that environment.
Anyone who's damaged rubber tracks learns pretty fast to really watch where they're working. With a smaller excavator it could be really hard to avoid driving on the demo debris. That's when nails and hidden sharp objects could damage the tracks.
I remember when I bought the first track machine back in 2001. It was a Bobcat T190. At the time I was a homebuilder and had been running wheel machines with every combination of tires in the quest to fight the dreaded framing nail. Foam filled, those flexible airless tires from Mclaren in addition to metal OTT. Foam rode like ****, the airless tires where expensive and sucked in the mud. The OTT's worked ok until one of the tires let it's air out. Tried foam filled with the OTT's and that was a ******* disaster - tore the tires to pieces. The turning point with me with CTL's came with the T190 when I was moving across the street from one lot to the other and saw those nails sticking out of the tracks, laughing like a Bond Villian. FWIW over 25 years of owning CTL's, we have never had a single cut that destroyed a track. Now we've had cuts in tracks that accelerated wear but not one instance of a single incident cutting a track in two.
Having appraised hundreds of mini ex's and ctl's over the years the most common cuts run longitudinal down the outside length of the belt. I wasn't sure of what was going on until I watched an operator run a machine down the street to a waiting trailer next to a curb. Sure enough he walked that machine right into the side of the curb and I watched the edge of the band get cut against the bottom of the track frame, the rollers and the curb just like someone taking a pari of tin snips to it. Nails and tramp steel didn't make much of a difference in a trade value. Those long cuts meant that new tracks got priced into the trade value.
Nails, most steel, and similar debris isn't much of a problem. Working on broken concrete or asphalt will tear them up pretty badly similar to the way @John C. describes.
4 ton excavator is dangerous for the machine & stick puller. 4 ton excavator is a land lord special you can't reach the roof push it in or fold the walls inside it foot print,gride it up with u/c of a 20ton hoe,walk on or control to do it safely for a bid job
I guess it depends on what type of demo jobs the OP was thinking of doing. He hasn't replied back so can only speculate if his excavator would be sufficient.
A 4-ton is big enough for small building demolition: mobile homes, backyard sheds, outbuildings, some detached garages, single story homes with low pitch roofs etc. Any building taller than maybe 10-12' at the peak is asking for trouble unless you are a very skilled operator. As for the rubber tracks, if you're somewhat careful you'll be fine. Just avoid the three R's: Rebar, Rocks and Rubble (broken concrete/masonry), also sharp metal like broken iron pipes and structural metal. Nails, wood, metal roofing and most other building materials are usually not a problem. As for disposal, just rent roll-offs as needed.
Do you guys ever save anything from the old buildings when you knock them down? I am a big fan of the old buildings, and am looking to buy old wood doors, lighting fixtures, fireplace mantels or decorations from the outside of the buildings. Let me know if you have anything old or antique in a building you are wrecking and I think we can make a deal. Let me know. Thanks, bro.
My former neighbor saved everything possible that could be resold. Pretty sure that's why he bid jobs lower to get them. Big market for old bricks especially klinker(sp). On one big job for the gov't. wasn't supposed to salvage anything but did anyway. His wife was selling stuff to people who came by the site. Like having strangers on site was safe. It was pretty much a disaster! She became the safety police yelling at me for getting a ride to the basement in an excavator bucket to cut pipes. It was a hell of a lot safer than the alternative... climbing down over a huge pile of busted concrete with lots of rebar sticking out. He was eventually kicked off that job and there was a big court battle between him and the partner he had on the job who bonded it. I didn't get paid for several month's. Ugly ugly ugly!!
Hey Wolf! It's been a while. A few years ago we did a project where they remodeled an early 1900's ware house and remove a lot old solid sawn southern yellow pine. It laid around in the parking lot until it was time to finish grade and the GC put it all in roll-off. It was a shame but I had no place to put it. I do have 3 tri-axle loads of late 1800's early 1900's clay bricks that were used as street pavers at my dump. Shipping would be a bitch though.
I LOVE the part about the ride to the basement in the bucket. That was actually a good idea, and like you said, it was a direct route avoiding climbing over all the dangerous debris. Why did the government tell you nothing could be salvaged from the building? How old was the building? Good for his wife selling stuff rathen than sticking it all in the dumpster!
Hey, thanks for remembering me. Cool to hear about your salvage. So sad that old pine ended up in the dump. There is a good market for the bricks. Have you had any interest? Any other demo in the works soon?
A contract can stipulate all kinds of conditions. It was a substantial building. I'm sure my neighbour was counting on the salvage to compensate for the lower bid. He assured the gov't. they could do the job for the bid price despite the gov't. asking if they wanted to modify their bid. They figured they wouldn't have got the job if they bid higher and it would have went to the next bidder who had more experience. It was the first major job the neighbour had bid on. That's why he needed a partner for the bonding. In that case I think the no salvage was so there wouldn't be a separate crew of people inside the building salvaging or strangers coming on site but more importantly they didn't want salvage operations to slow the project down. It had to be completed by a specific date. The whole thing was a big fustercluck! The biggest problem was they bid the job to low. The partner that bonded the job had legit concerns the salvage was taking too much time. Ugly is an understatement! It was his money on the line if there were penalties for going past the specified completion date. A bridge refurbishment contractor here faced $10,000/day penalties and they were more than a month behind schedule! They took a semi trailer full of fluorescent lights... that were obsolete a couple years later. I was cutting openings in cable trays so they could get all the wiring. That's probably the main money maker to salvage but they were trying to take as much as they could.
What kind of building was it, and how old was the structure? What machines did you use to demo it?
The DOT office building for the province. Built in the 50's I believe with substantial amounts of concrete. The gov't. figured it should have been a $500K+ job in the mid 80's. (Goverments do studies so they have an idea what demolition costs should be before they put them to tender) The court transcripts were on the net several years ago and I stumbled onto them. I knew it was ugly but reading through everything I'm surprised nobody got shot!
Past Friends single wide mobile home odd am belly fire burned under the floor length wise slow glow they got out safe,FD called & 2 hours after FD said it was cold/out left but some how fire crawled up inside the wall into free space of the ceiling & started again called FD & FD hosed it again after it was done & out,no rental equipment available we /friends helping hand demo b*****d was soild & next summer nextdoor burned but trailer park paid for 8 ton excavator to demo not having the reach or power & weight a backhoe would have been better- demo is an art
"Past Friends single wide mobile home...." A close older friend at around eighty owned a former ice cream plant on four acres. He had run a machine shop, but that too closed. His whole life he had been a pack rat, and several properties he owned gave him indoor space to conceal it. He had a bad interaction with prescription drugs, got eccentric. He bought things he had no reason to buy. He had a huge oil tank, half burried, he planned to build a huge steam boiler in. Among his treasures was a derelict mobile home. He went off to a hospital, and sharks among the Town Planning Commission smelled blood in the water, fined his wife on a daily basis until it was cleaned up. She asked me to take on the clean up. My son & I with a Case 580K backhoe, a Chevy C65 dump with 5' sideboards spent a week cleaning it up. We hauled several dozens of loads of trash 16 yards per load. Easiest was the mobile home. A single swing of the backhoe reduced the height by 8 feet. Thumb came in very handy crunching it up enough to fit in two truck loads. Only the frame needed to be cut up to go to a scrap yard. He recovered from his mental issue, but bad knees then disabled him, he didn't live long after that.
I'll take an 8 ton excavator over a backhoe any day on a residential demo. Sold the 420D I bought new in '03 a couple of years ago and haven't missed it. A 308 and a 420 are very, very similar in capacity, at least for what we do. Once demo'd a single wide in the woods with our 953C. Stripped it down, separated and wrapped up the frame then loaded it all out in 30's. Had 1 nice 30 of scrap from the frame and misc items like axles. Fun job.
I favor a backhoe for a number of reasons: It's what I have. I don't own a mini ex, or a skid steer. It runs down the highway at 22 MPH, eliminating the need to waste time of loading it. It moves the spoils dug out even more efficiently than a skid steer. Most jobs here are on a side hill. I don't like that an excavator swings at the angle of the hill. Up to a point, I can level a backhoe for a stable platform. Excavators if 4-6 ton lack the reach of a backhoe with extend a hoe. Very small excavators would tip over lifting a big rock, or propane tank. I do NOT claim a backhoe is a faster digger, unless the mini excavator is very small. I do find the limited reach of a 4 ton makes it difficult to pile dirt from a 5' deep trench on one side of the ditch. This is a bigger problem backfilling. It seems wrong that manufacturers rate backhoes by dig depth. Beyond 8 feet, I just don't care how deep it digs. I care more how far from the ditch I can reach for backfilling. I care how far I can be from debris falling from a house I might demolish. In an 8 ton machine, 23 feet is a lot of reach. A 20-40 ton excavator is certainly best for demo.
Very solid reasoning. I'm a "run what you brung" guy myself. Backhoe beats a CTL on roading for sure but a 279D tracked machine will run circles around a backhoe moving and grading dirt. Not even a comparison.
A 16 ton(3/4yd.) excavator will do a lot of demo. So will a 2yd. track loader about the same weight. That's what my former neighbour started out with. Took an old brick bank down including smashing the fault with a 3000lb. wrecking ball swung from the excavator. Cleaned the brick and palletized it for resale. 15 ton seems to be the size of machine to use starting off on larger demo than garages and sheds.
Why have a 15 ton when you can have a 30 ton zero swing?
Last one I did started with fire. Tried to salvage nails with an O/A torch and it got away from me. Honest.
A 30 ton zero swing would be nice but I was thinking of a good size machine to start out with that was capable of doing houses and medium size commercial buildings. A 15/16 ton is much easier to move too.
I suggest if there are mobile homes in the area that mobile home demo is doable with a 4 ton excavator. I know this because i’ve had several demoed and most recently that’s the machine that was used. A very big piece of this though us haul off. It’s been my experience that unless you have your own means to haul off the debris you’ll probably be left hanging and will be giving someone else a big piece of the profit. You also need to be able to cut up the frame as you go.
I was being tongue in cheek. Thread started out talking about a 4 ton, then an 8 ton, then a 15 ton so why not a 30?
I kind of thought so. 15 ton seems to be the transition fron utility machines to construction machines.
An excavator 30 years ago said: "20 ton is the biggest trailer I can tow with a tandem dump truck." Excavator model numbers are metric tons, you have to derate some for SAE tons. He bought excavators he could haul without a semi truck & trailer. More recently, I see trailers hauled behind a triaxle dump truck rated at 30 ton. Excavators have grown in size. No excavator has ever been too big for the job. It's easy to have one too small.
Sometimes you're fighting yourself if you have too small of machine for a job.