California Stone Slingers Is Revolutionizing the Way Contractors Backfill and Spread Construction Materials Out on the Jobsite throughout the Golden State By Brian Hoover, Senior Editor
D
avid Cruce has been surrounded by all things heavy civil construction for most of his life. His father owned and operated a grading and paving company, and David has spent nearly 30 years in heavy highway construction. Before venturing out on his own, Cruce spent the previous seven years working as an area construction manager for Papich Construction. Cruce formed
California Stone Slinger’s AT7 Stone Slinger with the RL26HD reloader pictured in their Fresno yard.
Heavy Road & Rail, Inc. in 2016 as a general engineering construction firm that specializes in Caltrans emergency work. The company is also heavily involved in site civil construction to include grading, paving, and concrete construction. But this story is not about Heavy Road & Rail; this is about Cruce’s newest exciting endeavor, California Stone Slingers, that is revolutionizing the way contractors backfill and place all sorts of materials on job sites throughout California.
California Stone Slingers was added as a dba to Heavy Road & Rail, Inc. in 2019. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and that is precisely how Cruce stumbled across this innovative material handling technology. “During my time at Papich, we had a Caltrans emergency job where we were taking down, stacking and pulverizing hazard trees. We were initially asked to haul the chips so far off-site that transporting one truckload would take an entire day. A fire had torn through this area the year before, so I approached Caltrans
