I'm a general contractor in Vermont, planning a 12-acre residential development that will require de-stumping and extensive regrading (~100K yards of cut and fill). I typically rent excavation equipment or sub out the work for my smaller projects. However, I am planning to keep the excavation work for this project in-house. I get the sense that buying will be a smarter choice than renting, considering the amount of earthwork. My tentative plan is to purchase an excavator with blade and thumb, an off-road truck, and a roller. Please let me know if you have any suggestions regarding: 1) buy vs rent, 2) size/specs of the equipment I need. Thank you!
Well you won't find and excavator with a blade that will be large enough to handle loading an offroad truck with any amount of production, and 2, one off highway truck won't keep the excavator busy. What is the timeframe for stumping and earthworks? 100,000bcy will be nearly 200,000 ton to move. Even with 2 months for ground work you need to average 5000 ton a day with the average 5 day week. How long will the haul to the fills be? also you have to cover downtime, setup,building haul roads,and disposing of stumps(non structural fill) and stumping in general within that. Now having said that, my knowledge base is mining, but production is production, and I think along the lines of a 50 ton hoe and a few 40 ton artic trucks would be a good start, with a dozer for leveling and a roller for compaction.
Yair . . . brunellj That question is a can of worms mate. There are too many variables to give any sort of decent opinion . . . ben46a has pointed out some of the obvious points . . . but I can't get my head around a fifty ton hoe and forty ton artics. (grins) An extra point I would make is on these jobs folks get fixated on excavators and trucks . . . why? In many cases the job has close dirt just begging for a couple of D7 sized tractors with pans. The far dirt may justify trucks and even if so the dirt can be bulked out with the dozer and loaded with a proper loader onto hired in road trucks. How long of a haul can you get on your twelve acres? If it's a reasonable site it may be possible with a bit of planning to balance much of the cut and fill . . . one of the advantages of pans is if you set it up properly you probably won't need a roller on the fill. A lot of course depends on the time-frame for the job . . . and the price has to be adjusted accordingly with allowances for your season . . . on average will it be dry or rainy weather? Good luck and cheers.
Scrub, I thought scrapers initially, but vermont is a fairly rocky state and I didn't think that scrapers would be best for the conditions likely to exist.
Yair . . . Gotcha ben46a As always it's difficult to give a sensible opinion unless you know the conditions . . . it's good to throw some ideas around though. Cheers.
Welcome to the Forums brunellj!:drinkup As Scrub said, your question is a can of worms. It's tough to give advice on such large decision (100K CY's, rent vs buy) without knowing more information. I can give advice on self performing your own development work as I have been there before. First of all it can be very profitable to the bottom line. However, with such a relatively large job you will invest a good sum of money and time to create a separate entity per say, to perform your own excavation work -production equipment, support equipment, maintenance and employees to run this operation. This will take time out of your schedule and money out of cash flow to manage appropriately in order to achieve the savings you are looking for. The problem is you will need more work beyond this project to keep the machine you will create going unless you sell off the equipment and fire your employees when the job is done, which will create another a problem in itself once the project comes to completion. In a nut shell it's a tough balancing game to make it work out between having a dirt crew and developing property unless you plan on the new entity becoming a subcontractor and working for other GC's and developers or the market is so hot you sell everything you produce. If you plan on carrying the excavation entity forward and working as a sub, that also presents a new set of hurdles breaking into a market that is saturated with low ballers.:cool2 I don't mean to be the rain on the parade but just share some of my experiences being in that position. After being a self performing developer, now I am a subcontractor and to be honest it's a much easier, I don't shoulder the liability and get paid as the project advances.
CM1995 brings on interesting points. We got into the dirt business as part of our GC business and it was 10 years to get out. The equipment is the cheap part- budget another $30K for tools, fuel tanks, lost sleep,water, compaction( the most critical). Old school is scrapers- really limited afterwards- If they'll work efficently hire them- if not- look at hoes and truck or loader. Remember the 100k cut in fill is probably only 20% of the budget if you are also doing underground servicing in which you need the hoes and another $40K in small tools, lasers , compaction and shoring. On less than 10 acre sites we were very effective with hoes and a large 8 yard loader (Cat 988b or Volvo L330) The loaders running steady at 140k lbs loader really create great compaction- and you only need 1-3 tools instead of 4-6- less capital investment. Don't know about east but out west it is easy to get guys running below cost. Why tie up your capital when others were work for less.
I think the OP has it backwards. If I were him I would hire out the large jobs and self-perform the small ones. It seems plain as day to me. I don't think I really need to go into detail.
Definitely not scraper country, at least the parts I spent the summers of my youth although there may be small sites where they might work. I'd go with a smaller hoe, say 20 tonne size, a tandem dump truck and a small dozer. Rent a compactor when and if you need it. First the hoe, a 20t is big enough to pull stumps, load a tandem truck, dig culverts etc while it is not to big to dig basements and even a utility trench. A tandem dump can move dirt around the site and haul in gravel, aggregate or topsoil from elsewhere as needed. With a tag trailer it can haul the tracked equipment to the next site. Finally a small dozer like a d3 to a d5 size can clean up the roots and branches, grade gravel and topsoil, push dump truck piles and still move a lot of dirt over a short distance. As a general rule, efficiency goes up as the equipment used gets larger, as long as it isn't too big for the job or the site. On the other hand there isn't much a smaller machine can't do given enough time. If you really need to knock this site out in a hurry, rent some big stuff, your equipment will still have plenty to do.
Thanks for the input. At this point, it's not clear how far the dirt will be need to be hauled. This is because the grading needs to be phased due to Vermont regulations, which stipulate a maximum of 5 acres of exposed/non-stabilized earth at any given time. We're trying to optimize our phasing plan and minimize how far we push dirt. This does happen to be a sandy site, so scrapers may indeed be the way to go. I'm not really interested in purchasing dozers, as I have little use for them aside from this project. I'm thinking I may buy a medium-sized hoe and sub out the bulk work to someone with some dozers.