Two for the price of one

When Great Falls, Montana-based Pacific Steel & Recycling decided that some of its smaller yards needed more processing capacity, the company went shopping for new material handlers.

Kelly Frantzich, equipment manager for Pacific Steel, was fielding requests to several OEMs for mobile shears mounted on a wheeled machine. The company struck luck when Colleen Miller, national account and sales manager for Sennebogen, Straubing, Germany, answered her request and suggested an 830 M paired with a new multi-function that the manufacturer had recently introduced in Europe.

As Miller explained to the Pacific Steel managers, the new Sennebogen Vario Tool would give their yards a mobile shear that could still perform traditional scrap-handling duties. Sennebogen describes the tool as an “oversized Swiss Army knife,” designed especially for scrap processing and demolition work.

A unique coupling system connects the boom and a custom stick to any one of several attachments, including shears, orange peel grapples, clamshell buckets, lifting hooks or a magnet without having to get out of the machine.

Frantzich says, “We were intrigued by the idea for some of our smaller yards where we don’t get full utilization of a shear machine and material handler. Or it might be a good fit for larger yards where we’re doing some offloading, plus we get the shear too. The Vario Tool is designed to complete all the required connections for each attachment automatically, so operators are able to switch from one to another, in two minutes or less, without leaving the cab.”

With the Vario Tool system installed on a wheeled Sennebogen 825, 830, or 835, Frantzich says having one machine able to do two jobs or more allows significant savings compared to a single-use machine that would otherwise be utilized only 15 percent to 20 percent of the time.

Jack Stoken, operations manager at Pacific Steel’s facility in Kalispell, Montana, agrees. Stoken’s yard was the first to receive one of the three Vario Tool machines that Pacific Steel has ordered.

“We are a mid to smaller sized yard for this company with our scrap iron business. We have a scrap handler, and we have a Genesis shear on another machine,” he says. “We handle a lot of shred here, with relatively little heavy iron. But we needed a little bit more capacity because we were falling behind in our processing.”

Stoken’s Sennebogen 830 M arrived this past September, equipped with the Vario Tool and two attachments: a Genesis 555 rotator shear and a hydraulic grapple. “Adding a new 830 with the Vario Tool attachment seemed to make sense,” Stoken says. “The 830, with its high-flow hydraulics circuit, has plenty of power to run the shear. It will be a scrap-handler most of the time, but it will also fill in as a shear. It’s less costly to buy one machine versus two; it gives us more options and it’s able to cover both of the other machines if one goes down.”

Stoken continues, “Our main demand is unloading customers, feeding balers and loading trucks. Right now, our shear is out of the yard on a large project, so we have the 830 filling in with the shear. This allows us to offer more services to our clients without sacrificing productivity in the yard. Changing the attachments is very easy and can be done in under two minutes We will be mounting a camera on the boom to give the operator a better look when coupling. It will get even quicker as they get more experienced with it.”

The staff in Kalispell is also pleased with their new unit, given the 830 M is larger than their older scrap handler. Operators say they appreciate the comfort of Sennebogen’s elevating Maxcab, and they appreciate its quiet running. The maintenance crew finds the machine accessible and easy to service.

“Colleen pointed out the effort that Sennebogen put in to make it user-friendly for us to maintain, where other OEMs want to bring their own tech out. That adds a lot of extra expense and time that doesn’t need to be there,” Stoken says.

Stoken adds that, along with the Vario Tool feature, service support was a deciding factor in going with Sennebogen. One of Stoken’s technicians is among a group of seven Pacific Steel staff who were enrolled in the hands-on factory training program at Sennebogen’s Training Center in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The yard is also supported by a local heavy equipment shop that now has a factory-trained Sennebogen mechanic on its team. Located just ten minutes from the Pacific Steel facility, they were quick to enroll in Sennebogen’s Authorized Service Provider (ASP) program.

“Over the years, they have done a great job for us,” Stoken says, and the same service crew can continue servicing all of the Kalispell fleet, he adds.

Pacific Steel has been working with Sennebogen machines in various locations since 2007. “Sennebogen has proven themselves to us,” says Frantzich. “They are in for the long haul; material handlers are all they do. It’s a good quality product.”