Equipment focus: Rising to the challenge

“When we say we’ll do it … we’ll do it.” It’s not just a motto at Lindamood Demolition — located in Irving, Texas — it’s a statement and the principle that the company’s foundation was built on. It certainly rings true for the 39-year-old company who believes no job is too big or small. Lindamood Demolition is now one of the largest demolition contractors in Texas and continues to grow.

The family-owned business of 85 full-time employees has made great strides since opening its doors in 1975, when the company started with a small track loader and an old truck for demo work. Over the years, the business has been built up to feature a large fleet that includes 20 excavators (ranging from 50,000 to 175,000 pounds), 25 track loaders and 35 big 18-wheeler trucks.

The company also operates the largest high-reach boom in the South at 120 feet tall, which allows it to tackle taller buildings, where implosions are not feasible, and replaces the old crane and ball system.

Lindamood Demolition has quite the repertoire, specializing in commercial and residential demolition, implosions, asbestos and tree removal, heavy hauling, and lumber and tree mulching. Its primary work is on bridge and building demolition, pavement removal, and implosions.

Having one of the largest demo businesses in Texas brings many high-profile jobs along the way. This includes Texas A&M’s football stadium: Kyle Field, Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) International Airport and Providence Hospital, among many others. The company has demolished almost every type of building there is: office buildings, warehouses, apartments, hospitals, schools, homes and other structures.

Big break

While Lindamood specializes in imploding buildings, often times during the demolition process a hydraulic breaker is required to achieve breaking performance where blasting is not conceivable. Lindamood features a few different breakers in its lineup, including three from Independence, Ohio-based Chicago Pneumatic (CP): two RX 8 light hydraulic breakers and one RX 54 heavy hydraulic breaker. The RX 54 is new to the company’s fleet in 2014 after Jake Lindamood, vice president and operations manager of Lindamood Demolition, went to ConExpo-Con/Agg in Las Vegas and found himself walking by the Chicago Pneumatic booth.

“I didn’t look up Chicago Pneumatic prior to the show because we already had two CP skid-steer-mounted breakers that worked really well,” says Lindamood. “We were walking by their booth and decided to stop and tell them how well the breakers worked for us. We talked with Greg Petherbridge, CP national sales manager, and decided we could use a heavy hitting breaker and purchased an RX 54 for our lineup.”

The RX 54 is the largest breaker offered in the CP lineup; features a service weight of 9,300 pounds; delivers an impact rate of up to 380 to 570 blows per minute (bpm); is in the 12,000 foot-pound class; and is specified for carriers in the weight class of 39 to 70 metric tons. It is ideal for heavy demolition, rock excavation and quarry applications, and the recent CP addition is designed to achieve greater breaking performance in tough applications without requiring additional hydraulic input.

“The RX 54 is easy to operate, hammers very smoothly, hits really hard; it’s clean and everything stays together on the breaker — it doesn’t have a lot of loose parts that are vibrating off of it, it’s just a heavy-duty, well-built hammer,” Lindamood says. “We have a different brand breaker in the same weight class and the CP one hits twice as hard as the other hammer even thinks about hitting.”

According to Lindamood, since purchasing the RX 54, his team has reduced the time it has spent on projects that involve using breakers by 40 percent or more compared to breakers they have used in the past. Using a breaker as strong as the RX 54 allows the fleet more flexibility. Instead of using two breakers on separate machines, the company is able to use just one machine without sacrificing efficiency.

“It just blows through what needs to get done so quickly because it hits so hard,” Lindamood says. “All my guys fight for the CP breakers. I hear my operators all the time saying, ‘give me the Chicago Pneumatic’. They don’t want to even use our other breakers anymore, so it’s likely that we will update all of our breakers to CP. The operators love it because, whatever they need to work on, they can get it done in close to half the time compared [with] competitive breakers.”
 

Bridging the gap

Bridge deficiencies are a big concern throughout the U.S., but it is especially concerning in Texas, which is home to 52,561 total bridges. As of 2013, nearly 10,000 of those bridges were deemed structurally deficient or functionally obsolete and have created many opportunities for Lindamood. It’s on bridges that the demolition company busts out its breakers and goes to work. The company primarily employs its CP breakers to hammer the abutments, pier caps and columns of the bridges. The abutments alone are very thick slabs of concrete, where Lindamood Demolition typically finds itself hammering anywhere from 4- to 8-foot-thick abutments.

A recent bridge job had the Lindamood crew scheduled to finish at the end of the weekend on a Sunday evening. With the power of the RX 54, Lindamood finished late Saturday afternoon — more than an entire day ahead of time. The CP breaker saved a complete day, as the operator was able to get through the abutments, pier caps and columns quickly and efficiently.

“Usually abutments will take us a long time using other breakers in our lineup, but our operator blew right through them with the RX 54,” Lindamood says. “The breaker pulverized the abutments and allowed us to haul the pieces off that same day. It’s not often that a single piece of equipment like that could literally save you an entire day’s work.”

Other recent high profile jobs that required the CP RX 54 were Kyle Field at Texas A&M and the DFW Airport parking garages. Both required the RX 54 to demolish columns and supports. The DFW Airport parking garages would have proved to be a challenge with 20-foot long, 10-foot-wide and 8-foot-thick supports, but the RX 54 had great success getting through it.

While Lindamood Demolition has owned the RX 54 for less than a year, the company is already seeing a difference in the operation. Upgrading its breaker lineup wasn’t part of its original plan going into ConExpo-Con/Agg, but after talking with CP, the company realized the impact it could make in its fleet. With a motto like Lindamood’s, it’s important to back it up. They not only back it up, but they do so on time and on budget. Simply put, that’s good for everyone’s bottom line.

The article was submitted on behalf of Chicago Pneumatic, Independence, Ohio.