EARTHMOVING & EXCAVATION
CANADIAN FIRST: UTILITY CONTRACTOR DIGS SAVINGS OF AUTOMATIC EXCAVATOR SYSTEM GNSS-based system cuts time, manpower and material needs
By Larry Trojak
O
n a jobsite in Abbotsford, British Columbia, about an hour from Vancouver, a bit of construction equipment history is being made. There, an excavator is trenching for utilities in support of a new industrial park. While that is obviously not trailblazing, the fact that the machine doing the trenching has been equipped with a GNSS-based automatic excavator system, the first in a utility application in Canada, is. The company heading up the project, Regehr Contracting, reports that using the new solution has already helped them realize significant savings in time, manpower and material, and sees a wealth of uses for it as they move forward.
Utility installation ideal for new system
Despite its current position at the forefront of cutting-edge technology, Regehr Construction’s roots are humble ones. When Kenton Regehr first started his company, he was focused on hourly work; digging house basements and performing miscellaneous agricultural projects. Since then, the company has evolved into one with more than 50 people, four separate divisions, and a breadth of expertise in everything from demolition to mobile aggregate processing to stream restoration and more. One of those strengths is in utility installation, which is where the new solution was introduced according to James Cucheran, one of Regehr’s supervisors. “Our civil/residential group handles this type of work,” he said. “The site, a two-acre parcel located on Great Northern Avenue in Abbotsford, will be the home to three different tilt-up structures – all part of a future industrial complex. We were installing roughly 300 metres of storm, sanitary and water services for the complex, a process that can be tricky for 20
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accuracy at times and almost always involves two men in addition to the machine operator.” The traditional approach to which Cucheran refers starts with a surveyor laying out the direction of travel for the utility by either spray painting a line on the ground or using a theodolite to make certain the excavation is maintaining the proper line. Then, once excavation begins, a rod man must also be present in the trench to ensure a proper and accurate grade on which aggregate will be placed and the pipe will be set by another worker. A visit from Cory Luck, territory manager for Brandt Positioning made them aware that an ability to trim that workforce – while at the same time improving efficiency and accuracies – could be possible with an X-53x Automatic Excavator system from Topcon Positioning Systems.
The Topcon X-53x automatic excavator system is easy to install and operate.
“Regehr was already a customer of ours for other GPS technology and they were looking at machine control for the excavation facet of their projects,” he said. “I showed them what the new solution could do for them and they just happened to have the Great Northern job coming up. The timing could not have been better.”
Digital model and automatics pair up
While machine control for excavators has been around for a while, the control they provide has typically been limited either to showing where the operator’s bucket is (an indicate-only system) or directly targeting grade via a digital model, onboard sensors and an in-cab display (3D GPS). The system that Regehr added to its John Deere 345 G takes that control to the next level, presenting the operator with
