Monthly Archives: June 2016

Rent heavy equipment after carefully deliberating the pros and cons

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It is pretty obvious that you do not want to keep your construction equipment lying idle and want to make some use of it. In case, you are running out of projects and do not have much work to put all your machines to some use, you might consider to rent them. But by just renting the machine can’t ensure that you do not have to worry about it any longer. No wonder that you can start getting rental money on each and every month but there is something you are losing in this bargain. Well, you are definitely not losing your equipment but if you hand it over to the wrong chap, then you will without doubt get scrap in return at the end of the rental term.

It is therefore very crucial to identify the pros and cons of renting the machine before you actually go for the deal. Knowing the benefits and the disadvantages can help you a long way in taking a concrete decision on how you should be going ahead with the deal. If you have been renting machines in the past, then you would be knowing about how to deal with situations but if you are a newbie, then you got to learn things first before you go to strike a deal.

Identify the heavy equipment you want to let out:-

It is very critical to first identify the heavy equipment that you want to put on rent. You may not want to give a new one on rent as you may want that for your projects. You can play around with the older stuffs that you have. Check your inventories, know what you have and rent the machine that are not being used by you any longer. Do not let out the new equipment if you have any and especially not the ones that you feel are doing great guns in your company. You should pick out the ones that are lying idle for long, the ones that are not technologically advanced and are probably a little out of date.

Renting heavy equipment has high possibility of it getting worn out before than ever:-

If you have decided to let out your heavy equipment, you should also be ready to acknowledge the fact that you will not get it back the way you gave it to the taker. When you rent your heavy equipment, the user uses it exclusively to complete his projects on time and he may use the machine the way he wants without paying much attention to the wants of the machine. This may end up in deteriorating the quality of the machine and at the end of the rental period you will find the machine to be in a bad state. You may also have to spend lot of money in getting it repaired so that you can probably rent it again or just sell it to another person.

Therefore, do not spend all that you have made from the rental income. Save some money to get the stuff repaired.

Selling heavy equipment that are on the verge of becoming obsolete

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Heavy equipment being so expensive, we use them to the fullest and then when we see no further use we try to sell it off to someone who may need it in his business. But as years passes by, we see a lot of changes in the technology of a machine and people ideally do not wish to buy something that is very old. They like to go with heavy equipment that are known to the operators and they do not experience a hard time to work on it. Now in a situation like this, if you have a machine that has been with you for decades and now it just can’t be used at all, you are perhaps left with no other option than to sell it as scrap. A person with a sane mind will never buy it with the intention of using it in his construction business. It will simply not work.

In case, you sell the heavy equipment as scrap, you are not getting anything out of it. Just few hundred dollars and you are done. But what if a company is ready to pay few thousand dollars for the same piece of metal. It sound to be unrealistic but as a matter of fact there are some companies that deal with age old heavy equipment and buy them by paying decent amount of money which a person selling it can’t even expect to get for that old stuff. These companies are always in the hunt of old heavy equipment that people are happily willing to do away with.

The modus operandi of these companies is to buy the machines at real cheap rate and change their parts with newer ones. They work to give it an altogether new look and also installs gadgets that are currently in demand. Overall, they make it look like a brand new heavy equipment and sell it at a price much less than the ones that you normally buy from the heavy equipment manufacturing companies. These companies have engineers working for them. These engineers have loads of experience in producing heavy equipments. They are also provided with all the equipments that are required to manufacture construction machines. It is just that they can’t use the name of the brand on the machines or else they mostly produce machines which are a bit less than par to the original ones.

It makes a lot of sense to sell old heavy equipment to these companies. They are ready to buy machines that are not bought by anybody. So before you plan to sell it off to such companies, it is better that you first check the number of such companies available in your city. You can contact them and check the price they are ready to pay. Do not commit to anybody but speak with as many people as you can and know the price they are ready to pay you. You can then sell the machine to the person who can pay you the most. In this way, you can get rid of very old heavy equipment and can still make decent money from it.

Lien property that your heavy equipment was on

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There is always a danger that you will not be paid for your work from the person for whom you are working. This can result in huge loss for your company as you have to pay the dues to your employees which is quite obviously not going to be a meager amount and if you are unable to collect the money from the guy for whom you have been working then that will lead to big problem for you as well as for your company. In order to avoid this loss, you can place a lien on the property that your heavy equipment was on. Placing a lien will ensure that you have the right to dispose of the property after the completion of work to any third party if you are not paid for your work. In case you dispose it off, you will be able to get your dues paid and in turn you can even pay the dues of your employees that is liable on you.

We would be discussing the reasons on which you can place a lien on the property your heavy equipment have been working.

Being paid slowly or not in time:-

This is one of the indication where you should act and act fast in placing a lien on the property. If you paid fairly slow or are paid not in time, it only indicates that the person is either not interested to pay you the entire sum and is paying you a bit so that you continue with the work and once it is done he can just shrug off the responsibility to pay the entire sum of the work. Many small construction companies have suffered huge losses as they failed to put a lien on the property and it finally resulted in non-payment of their dues. You not have much to do later once you are done with your work. You have to get off the place with your machine as you have to take care of other businesses as well.

The project giver disputing your work time and again:-

This is another usual instance that many construction companies experiences in their career span. The person for whom they are working will come out with very lame and silly reasons and will make a huge mole of a mountain. You may not know if they are doing it so that they do not have to pay you the promised sum or are they genuinely unhappy with your work. It is recommended that you take their feedback and work as per their needs but if they still complain and threats not to pay you, putting a lien on their property should be the next step you should take to protect your rights.

Small contractors not getting paid by the project owner:-

At times small contractors who do not own the project directly and work for somebody else are also at risk of not getting paid by the project owner. They can also place a lien on the property and ensure that they are paid in full for their work.

 

Heavy equipment crashes

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Heavy equipment crashes has claimed many lives and we are yet to do something concrete about this. These sorts of crashes happen more often in small construction sites where the work is in charge of small time contractors who are not interested in spending any money in buying modern heavy equipment nor want to recruit competent heavy equipment operators. These crashes are somewhat taints the overall picture of the construction industry.

On one hand, people consider this business as one of the most profitable business and on the other hand, it is also being frowned at due to sheer negligence on the part of the contractors and other co-workers. Some accidents happen due to poor quality of heavy equipment, some happen due to experienced men working on the machine and some happen due to negligence adopted by people working on the jobsite. Overall, the ultimate sufferers are the men who work in such a risky environment and are prone to become victim of such a fatal crash.

One such crash happened with an earth moving excavator which was working next to a pond mistakenly went inside it and got submerged in it. The operator died in this incident. These types of crashes have become quite common but this can’t be used as an excuse. There is a human life that is getting lost in this process and it is high time that people start taking such crashes very seriously and also take preventive actions to avoid them in the future. Incidents like workers getting crushed to death have also come to the forefront. The pattern of accidents may not be common but the incidents are becoming rampant and the need of the hour is to ensure that mechanisms are put in place to curb such accidents and if at all they occur then there should be enough resources to tackle the problem and get the man out of the death trap.

Some learning that we can take from such accidents is to refrain from recruiting incompetent operators. They can post direct threat to their lives as well as to the life of others. Hiring inexperienced operators is still manageable as he can be given the right kind of training and can be used as a useful resource. You can figure out a competent and an incompetent operator from his attributes and his attitude towards work. This should give you a clear indication whom you should keep and whom should you fire.

Also make sure that you do not give lot of stress to the operator. Let him work in a comfortable environment. He is bound to make mistakes if he is under any sort of stress and any small error on his part can cost you dearly. While the heavy equipment is on a roll, clear instruction should be given to other workers to not work around it. They can move to a different place or do something else but not to wander around the machine. Following these steps can only minimize the incidents of heavy equipment crashes and bring down the figures of death toll on the jobsites.

Related articles across the web

Biggest heavy equipment in the world

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Heavy equipment companies have manufactured and are also in the process of manufacturing bigger heavy equipment. The bigger the machines they are able to build, the more they get the recognition in the world of construction and mining. In order to get the work done faster, you either need more number of heavy equipment to do the work for you or you need one big giant machine that can take into account the work of all the machines put together. This one big machine may even take less than a day to dig up a place that is equal to the size of a football field. So big machines not only mean getting the work done sooner and employ lesser machines for the job. It also means doing the work with accuracy and maintaining the level of quality at any given point of time.

We will first be talking about a German made bucket-wheel excavator that perhaps does not look or sound anything close to an excavator. It is been christened as Bagger 288. The weight of this machine is around 13,500 tons and was built to excavate coal from a German coal mine. Right from day one, it seems that Bagger 288 is able to excavate around 240,000 tons of coal on a daily basis. This is simply phenomenal because if we compare it to something that we can comprehend, it means that it can dig up to 30 meter of a football field. As a matter of fact, the coal that is excavates on a single day can fill up around 2400 coal wagons. Speaking a bit about the excavator, it is up to 220 meter long and 96 meter high. The amount of electricity it requires externally is 16.56 megawatts and has a travel speed of 2-10 meter per minute. The minimum turning radius of the excavator is 100 meters and has an inclination of 1:18.

The Bagger 288 has 18 buckets installed in it which gives it the potential to hold around 6.6 cubic meters or overburden. However, the most difficult part is when the machine needs to be moved to some other place. It seems that it takes more time and money to dismantle the machine and take it piece by piece. On the other hand, they prefer porting the machine in one single piece. It has been agreed that utmost care needs to be taken to move the machine from one location to another. This also requires good number of skilled men who can ensure that while the machine is being ported, it does not damage the eco-system around it.

This seems to be an engineering marvel as it is even difficult to imagine something as huge as Bagger 288. Today, we also have an updated version of Bagger 288 which is Bagger 293 which weighs around 14,200 tons. Machines of this stature are one in million and the cost of producing such a piece is overtly expensive and also consumes a lot of time. So as long as heavy equipment companies do not get an order to produce something like this, they prefer to keep producing the conventional machines.

Rent a Cat heavy construction equipment from me

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Renting heavy construction equipment has never been as simple as it is in today’s time. Earlier when there was no internet and when people had to hunt for machines on rent, they were largely dependent on newspaper advertisements or classifieds that gets published in some magazines that is based on construction equipment or equipment salesman. Another mean to know if someone is renting a machine is through a person from their circle. Other than this, they were hardly any means to know if anybody is renting heavy construction equipment. Things have however changed for better now and with the advent of internet we are get what we want at a faster rate and we can also expect to get something better through internet. Nowadays, brand matters a lot and someone who is letting out branded items are invariably everyone’s choice.

We have Equipment Company that is in the business of renting branded heavy equipment and one can indeed vouch for what they have to offer to the construction companies. They are in the business of heavy equipment for the last 20 years which makes them one of the most experienced in the lot. Experience does matter and when it matters it matters a lot. So a company with over 20 years of experience will suggest you machines based on your needs. If needed they will do an overview study of your project and try to understand what kind of heavy equipment will best suit your project. This will help them to give you better suggestions and this is what they have been doing since long.

You can vouch on them on any kind of heavy construction equipment. Right from a dozer to an excavator to scraper or a grader, all you have to do is name the equipment you are looking for to take on rent and you will get that at a better price; a price that you will not get at many places. So here you can get some real good branded machine at an affordable price. All you have to do is check their website and see the machines. In case, you need to speak to someone to get a better picture about the services you get from them, then you can get the number of the person and call them up to get all your questions answered.  817-733-3799

Common Equipment Used in Demolition

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Heavy equipment is manufactured for all different fields of work. Each machine type has a general application that it may be used in such as dirt work and excavation. Some machines can be used for applications other than what they are primarily intended for. Crawler loaders, dozers and excavators make dirt moving equipment but they are also great machines to use for demolition purposes.

Demolition using a crawler loader:

Crawler loaders are great when moving dirt and materials. They are also very handy in the demolition side of the construction industry. Crawler loaders can not only be used to push down structures but are also used for clean and moving debris. Using a tracked loader is ideal for clearing debris because of its use of tracks to propel the machine. This allows the unit to move freely amongst the construction without worry of damaging tires as you would with a wheeled unit. Also with tracks a crawler loader can track up on to piles and clear out areas a wheel unit would not be able to get into.

Demolition using a dozer:

Dozers are typically used to push dirt, grade, and cut roads. In demolition a dozer can be a very useful piece of equipment.  A dozer can be used to push down and clear smaller structures with a single piece of equipment. The dozer can push the structure down, then it can be used to clear the area or pile the material. While not being the most efficient piece of equipment for demolition it still does maintain its usefulness.

Demolition using an excavator:

An excavator is probably one of the most useful pieces of equipment used in demolition. Dependent on the size of the machine, it would be able to take down most structures big or small. Excavators are very versatile in demolition because of the different types of attachments available. An excavator can be attached with hammers, claws, buckets, thumbs, magnets, and shears. All of the attachments can be used for the various aspects of demolition. For example an excavator with a hammer can be used to break down a structure, then swap over to a claw then use the machine to clear and load the debris. Alternative to using those attachments an excavator with a bucket and thumb could do both. The thumb attachment allows the excavator to grab and hold on to debris as it is picked up.

Depending on the needs of the job any of the machines are suitable for demolition. Whichever machine is chosen would be based on the needs and demands of the work load.

What makes oneself a good heavy equipment sales person

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Like not everybody is capable of becoming a doctor or an engineer. In the same way, not everybody can become a good sales person. It is true that we all need to sell some or the other thing in our lives but that does not make us a good salesman. In a nutshell, selling is considered to be the most difficult profession and not many can succeed in making it their career. Being a good sales person needs skill, needs confidence and needs all the ingredients that will make the other person realize that you are selling the right stuff to them. In case, if you are not confident on what you are selling, then they might hesitate to buy the most beneficial thing of their life.

Selling items of less value may not be so hard but if you are given to sell heavy construction equipment then you may find yourself in a tough spot. Heavy equipment are real expensive items and it is certainly not an easy task to sell it to construction companies. Moreover, when you are trying to sell the equipment to a person who uses heavy equipment of some other brand, it is very difficult to penetrate and steer their thoughts to buy your product. They may be very loyal to their brand and may not feel comfortable to switch to some other brand. You may have to know yours as well as his products really well so that you can first make a comparison at your end and understand what extra you can offer him which he may not get from his brand. Providing discounts may not always work because people look for quality in machines. They may not want to have any discounts and will certainly not be ready to compromise on the quality of the machine.

Learn the in and out of the product:-

It is very important to know the in and out of the machine you are trying to sell. You can’t sell something that you are not sure about. While you are in the sales business, you may come across people who are experts in construction equipment and may give you a valuable suggestion about the product. Therefore, knowing about the product will give you the scope to counter them and possibly may sell the item to them.

Know your competitors well:-

Remember, you are not the only person selling heavy equipment and therefore you will have to face good number of competition from other players. It is imperative to know your competitors before you start pitching in for your product. Having no knowledge about your competitor’s product would be dangerous as it may tarnish your reputation as a salesman. People will find that you do not update yourself with the recent happenings in the world of heavy equipment.

Understand the needs of the customer:-

Please do not try to sell the customer something that he never wanted to have. You should first understand his requirement and then come up with a product. In this way, you will not only make a sale but will also earn respect for yourself.