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The 300-acre Delaware
Ridge development outside of Kansas City is a bit of an anomaly
for Miles Excavating Inc.: wide open spaces, no congested
traffic, and no existing residents encroaching on its construction
site. Seventy-five percent of Miles Excavating's work is in
street rehab
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| Steve
Miles mans an excavator used to backfill the 400-foot
trench surrounding the box culvert. |
No piece of this
site has gone untouched by Miles Excavating, as company crews
have performed all the grading, installed all the sewers,
coordinated all the drainage systems, graded all the roads,
and poured all the curbs. The only element not completed by
Miles Excavating is the asphalt paving. Before the roads can
be paved, however, one last piece of the puzzle needs to be
placed.
Miles Excavating
was tasked with installing a 350-foot-long, 14- x 14-foot
concrete box culvert, designed to drain 800 acres into the
Kansas River. A tough job calling for reliable machines, this
task involved cranes and six-wheel and articulated trucks.
But all the heavy grunt work<—the excavating of this
massive trench (15,000 yards of dirt)
Company Growth
a Result of Staunch Work Ethic, Dedication
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| Utilizing
PC400 JRB quick couplers, Miles places the bucket on backward
to square it to the culvert, helping puch together sections
of concrete. |
The best education
often comes from experience. Steve Miles, president of Miles
Excavating Inc., went from being a laborer at a feed lot in
Kansas City to a dozer operator to an equipment owner. To
buy his first used backhoe, he sold a horse and started doing
excavation work by the hour. Today, he owns and operates one
of the most successful construction companies in the Kansas
City area
"It's just grown
from there," says Miles. "My background had nothing to do
with learning business in college. I've learned the business
day in, day out. I've learned how to estimate, learned how
to get jobs, learned how to hire and keep the right workers."
A family man who
would much rather spend time at the controls of an excavator
than on the golf course, much of Miles's success can be attributed
to his deft knowledge of what equipment is best for each job
and how to best utilize the resources at hand. Street rehab
work requires a steady stream of trucks, both trucking out
debris and trucking in gravel to make sure streets are usable
by locals. It also requires reliable excavators that can effectively
move materials. Jobs like Delaware Ridge, where much of the
work involves excavation, depend more heavily on excavators
and their ability to constantly move dirt. In either instance,
the reliability and strength of his excavators are critical,
so when it came time to purchase two new 95,000-pound machines
to handle his company's workload, Miles took no chances and
stuck with a trusted product.
"Back when excavators
were first coming out with air conditioning, I tried another
piece of equipment with air conditioning over purchasing a
Komatsu hoe [excavator]," says Miles. "My superintendent was
operating the new machine, and it didn't take long before
he jumped off that brand new machine and back into the seat
of a Komatsu. We've grown comfortable with these machines,
and it seems that if we made a switch now, I'd have eight
or nine operators revolting."
Digging a Very
Large Hole
To accommodate
the 14- x 14-foot box culvert, Miles and his crew dug a trench
27 feet deep, 50 feet wide, and 400 feet long, hauling out
15,000 yards of dirt in a three-day period. On-site for this
task were one of the new PC400LC-6s with just less than 400
hours on it and another PC400 with 8,000 hours on the meter.
Digging conditions weren't the easiest because of a great
deal of rock that had to be forced out with an NPK hammer
fitted to one of the excavators. For such instances, the Komatsu
features a Power Up switch that increases implement force
by 9% and five individual working modes that help tailor machine
performance to the given application
"Operating the
PC400LC-6 in our dirt operations seems to work the best for
us," says Miles. "It provides the right size and performance,
and we don't need a machine bigger than that, as we move these
units around from site to site a lot."
To get the dirt
out, Miles matches his excavators with six-wheel-drive trucks
capable of hauling 15 yards of dirt per cycle. Miles hauled
the dirt and piled it up at another location on-site for easy
access when backfilling. When the trench's depth reached 27
feet and hit solid rock, Miles brought the trench back up
to a 24-foot depth by hauling in 3 feet of riprap and 1foot
of gravel for the 40,000-pound sections of the culvert to
sit on.
When the base was
laid and the time came for a crane to individually place the
50-ft. sections of the culvert, the excavators still played
an important role. Utilizing the machine's JRB quick couplers,
Miles placed the bucket on backward to square it to the culvert
and helped push together individual sections of the concrete
(see pictures). As this occurred, a PC400LC-6 and a PC300LC-6
loaded six-wheelers and artic trucks that constantly hauled
backfill into the trench. Minus rainouts, the entire process
of installing the culvert took no more than seven days.
"The PC400s have
been a good machine for us," says Miles. "For top-loading
our trucks, whether it be in dirt or rehab work, I would see
no need in to go anything bigger."
Utility and
Rehab Work
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| Excavators
work to load articulated trucks with fill to be hauled
into the trench. |
The PC400LC-6 plays
a major role in the utility and rehab aspects of Miles's business
as well and is complemented with smaller excavators that help
finish jobs as efficiently as possible.
"We use the machines
primarily for digging pipe," says Miles. "We use the PC400s
on our really deep sewer projects and for toploading debris
into trucks. And we use our PC128UU to neatly rip out curb
on rehab projects."
Miles feels that
the smaller machine keeps homeowners along roadside street
projects happy. With its boom design and compact structure,
Miles is able to ensure that, even when ripping out existing
concrete and asphalt, people's lawns are damaged as little
as possible.
"The knuckle boom
on the 128UU is really why I went with that machine," he says.
"You can run right up alongside the curb and keep digging
straight up. With a normal tracked excavator, you'd wind up
in the center of someone's yard, not to mention damaging the
existing dirt bank. We like to keep that dirt bank as stable
as possible to eliminate the backfilling and sod work that
comes along with damaging someone's yard. That machine is
ripping out 50,000 feet of curb as we speak.
"With the PC400,
we'll drive right down a city street
Street rehab only
flows as smoothly as Miles describes it if you have equipment
that is strong enough to handle the rigors of such work and
is reliable enough to provide the necessary uptime to keep
operations moving. A reliable machine by design, this excavator
still provides a self-diagnostic system that monitors 119
machine functions. With the diversity of its work, Miles Excavating
benefits from the five working modes featured on the machine,
designed to tailor machine performance to each application,
whether digging, lifting, or manipulating attachments. The
PC400LC-6 also features Active Mode, a setting designed to
provide increased implement speed.
The 84-horsepower
PC128UU is designed precisely for the application Miles Excavating
uses it in. The offset boom features hydraulically controlled
hinges on both the boom and the bucket that allow for digging
nearly 2 feet outside of and parallel to the tracks while
the machine is facing straight ahead, as Miles describes.
The hinges also can be controlled to keep the boom and bucket
parallel, enabling the operator to dig straight, precise trenches
All of Miles Excavating's
excavators feature Komatsu's exclusive HydrauMind hydraulic
control system, comprised of closed-center, load-sensing valves
that react in direct proportion to pressure applied by the
operator to the controls, improving responsiveness for easier
fine-control and lifting operations.
"These excavators
are faster and smoother than other excavators we've used in
the past," says Randy Bates of Miles Excavating. When asked
about the machines' reliability and lifting power, Bates says,
"They'll just keep going, and for what we do, the lifting
ability is just fine."
Pride in a Job
Well Done
Besides his machines
and his crews, Miles gives a lot of credit to the guys who
sell and service his machinery.
"RoadBuilders Machinery
has really taken care of us," says Miles. "Regardless of whether
a machine can do somersaults, it means nothing if you don't
have the right people backing it up. Gerry Buser and Phil
McCoy go to bat for us, and it's nice to know that you've
got people outside of your own company who care just as much
about your assets as you do.
"We pride ourselves
in quality, honesty, and speed. We get in. We get out. And
we treat our customers how we want to be treated. It helps
facilitate our work better, and I think that quality shows
in our work, in our employees, and in the pride we all take
in what we do."
That same pride
keeps Miles off the golf course and in the seat of an excavator
on Friday afternoons. Combined with a strong support network
of equipment, distributors, and employees, Miles can't go
wrong. And the days of selling off horses to buy equipment
are long gone.
GEC
- July/August 2004
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