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Article
from HEAVY EQUIPMENT NEWS - August 2003- Volume 8-Issue 8
UTILITY CONTRACTOR
SAVES $16,000 A YEAR
When you have
75 backhoes in your fleet, maintaining the pads on the stabilizer feet can be a
costly proposition. W. H. Construction of Auburn, Massachusetts, retrofitted
its backhoes with FlipPad International's new DoubleDuty ™ double-sided
rubber pads to cut down on the service time required to change out the pads,
and the move is expected to save the utility contractor $16,875 annually just
in replacement parts.
Traditional stabilizer
pads are rubber on one side for working on pavement and concrete, and cleated
on the other side for working on dirt. Since most of White's work is utility
renovation for New England municipalities, going to the double-sided rubber
pads just made sense.
"Ninety percent of our
work is on streets, notes Leo Sullivan, Equipment Division Manager for W.H.
White, "so you need to use rubber pads that will protect the street surface. If
we damage the surface, we have to fix it out of our pocket. We started to
experiment with the pads last year.
The contractor currently
has 60 backhoes retrofitted with the pads. Typically, the pads on one of
Sullivan's backhoes would have to be replaced twice a year. Now, one set will
last the year, reducing his overall replacement costs and cutting his service
time in half. A traditional pad FlipPad (cleats on one side and rubber on the
other) costs $400 to $450 per set, while the double-sided rubber pads costs
about $475 per set.
"They're a little more
than other replacement pads, but they provide twice the life, and that's a
significant savings for our company," Sullivan says. |
