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Field Service for Extreme Conditions
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Field Service for Extreme Conditions

January 04, 2008
Field Service for Extreme Conditions
Field Service for Extreme Conditions
Written by: Jennifer Oredson, Two Rivers Marketing

No matter what the job, Dwayne McAninch knows speed is crucial, and never more so than on one of McAninch Corporation’s recent jobs. The Des Moines, Iowa-based contractor did all the site prep for the new airport in Branson, Mo., and it’s the biggest job in the company’s history. It also had an extremely aggressive deadline.

“We were working 24 hours a day, five days a week down there,” says McAninch, chairman and CEO of McAninch Corp. “It’s the biggest job we’ve ever done, so we had more equipment assigned to that jobsite than any other jobsite we’ve worked on before. We simply could not afford any downtime.”

McAninch was in charge of Phase 1 of construction for the Branson airport, which is scheduled for a May 2009 opening. Phase 1 consists of moving about 10 million cubic yards of earth, building the runway (7,400 linear feet) and constructing the three-mile entranceway with bridges. They also installed water, sewer and fueling facilities, constructed parking lots, and graded for the terminal. The site sprawls across 600 acres, but it’s not just its sheer size that makes this McAninch’s largest job to date: it’s also the terrain of southern Missouri. An airport needs to be flat, of course, and the Ozarks are anything but flat, so the name of the game is “cut and fill”: cut hilltops off and use them to fill huge valleys.

“Anything you do in this area is going to be a challenge because of the mountainous, rocky terrain,” says Greg Hirth, who was the project superintendent. “You just got to get to the bottom and get started.”

McAninch started on this project in July 2007, and they completed most of the grueling work of preparing the site during the first quarter of 2008. Final finishing work for the terminal roadways and parking lots was concluded in the fall 2008. Because of the size of the job and the deadline, McAninch had about 75 pieces of equipment and nine service trucks assigned to this jobsite. The equipment was a mix of excavators, dozers and scrapers. The service trucks included a mix of Dominator® mechanics trucks from Iowa Mold Tooling Co. Inc. (IMT) and IMT SiteStar® lube trucks.

“Because we were running 24 hours a day, we had to service the equipment right here, and we had to keep it running,” says Curt Sutton, field mechanics foreman for McAninch. “We never quit, so the machines can never quit.”

Extreme Service
McAninch dedicated an unprecedented number of service trucks to the jobsite primarily because of the rocky earth and the little tolerance for downtime.

“The rocky terrain down there does a real number on the equipment,” Sutton says. “If it were dirt or soft clay on the jobsite, we definitely would not have put nine service trucks down there.”

Because McAninch has worked in the Ozark region before, they knew what they were getting into when they took on this job. Hirth says the rocky earth wears parts down so fast that they need replacing about twice as often as they normally would, and it’s even worse for some components.

“In the Ozarks, the life of a tire is about a quarter of what it would normally be,” Hirth says. “The rock just chews right through the tires.”

Vibration also takes a huge toll on the equipment. Driving over smooth surfaces is a breeze compared to riding over jagged rock. “Everything gets shaken to pieces, so we had to replace everything — radiators, wiring, pins — so much more often,” Hirth says. “You can’t run this huge equipment on rock and expect it to have the same life as it would in dirt or soft clay.”

On top of fixing the machines that break down and replacing the parts that wear out, the IMT service trucks were tasked with doing preventive maintenance. Aside from routine oil changes, the equipment needed greased every shift, and the big excavators were greased four times a day, twice a shift. In addition, IMT service trucks from various Caterpillar® dealerships were on the jobsite doing warranty work, so there were often more service trucks working alongside McAninch’s.

New equipment
McAninch had to buy new service trucks to meet the demands of this job. The company already had a fleet of 15 mechanics trucks and three lube trucks, but because of the scope of the Branson job on top of McAninch’s other jobs throughout the Midwest, they had to buy two more trucks for the airport project. With the new trucks, they had just enough service units to cover all of their commitments.

McAninch purchased a 2007 IMT Dominator IV mechanics truck with an 8025 telescopic crane, as well as a 2007 IMT SiteStar lube truck, and these two trucks were among those stationed at the Branson jobsite.

The Dominator IV truck and the 8025 telescopic crane were introduced in 2007, and this mechanics body is the first one on the market that can accommodate an 80,000 ft-lb crane. This was crucial to McAninch’s purchase decision because this jobsite required extremely large equipment — heavy equipment means heavy parts to service.

“Having the new Dominator IV truck with the 8025 crane on this jobsite really increased productivity because we could service more of the larger equipment faster than we could with the previous model,” Sutton says.

When McAninch ordered the 2007 SiteStar lube truck, they had it custom built. The standard SiteStar body’s hose reels are on the back of the truck, and the sides of the body contain the storage compartments. One of McAninch’s more significant specifications was that the hose reels be mounted on the side of the truck in order to save the operator time on each oil change. McAninch also specified that IMT install steel tanks instead of the customary polyethylene tanks because of the extreme conditions of this jobsite. IMT’s willingness to build engineered-to-order trucks made these custom specifications possible.

“When our equipment isn’t in the dirt, every second counts,” Sutton says. “We need to get our oil changes done as quickly as possible, so if we can shave off a minute or two here and there, we’ll do it.”

IMT’s new SiteStar body has some time-saving enhancements that McAninch appreciated. McAninch selected the new enclosed lube truck instead of the open version. The enclosed lube truck keeps the product tanks warmer, and when oil is warm, the viscosity changes and enables the product to pump faster. In some cases, this can save up to 15 minutes on an oil change.

“We were going full-bore 24 hours a day on that jobsite, so we simply could not afford downtime,” Sutton says.