Big excavators.
What contractor are you working for on that project? Is it the Kiewit/Gilbert Southern freeway project?
I’ve operated a couple of the larger shovels/excavators. I’ve run CAT 5110B and 5130B (FS and ME configurations). Komatsu PC1800, PC4000 and Hitachi 1200.
The 5110B and Hitachi 1200 were in construction settings under high production standards. The 5130B, PC1800 and PC4000 were in mines.
I don’t have an extensive amount of time as an operator in any of these. A couple hundred hours cumulatively; giving me enough seat time to form a few opinions.
Kiewit has three 5110B’s that work on the Pipeline and Heavy Civil Divisions. I’ve done a number of big jobs with one or two of those excavators on-site. While not 200-ton excavators, they’re some of the best excavators as far as power and balance go. You can take a 5110B with a 13yd bucket, heaped ~100-115%, turn over the side of the tracks and get no hop from the back track while raising the boom up and down. Very few ME excavators I’ve been on can do the same.
While not overly fast on any cycle speeds, the 5110B’s are very smooth which I feel makes up for any perceived lack of speed. A good operator in a 5110B with a 13yd bucket will turn out a 777 with a 4 pass average; keeping spec times under 1:10/load.
I’ve never got to see a 5110B run head-to-head with either a Komatsu PC-1250 or a Hitachi 1200 so I don’t know firsthand how they would on a production level.
I have been on a job with a PC-1250, laying shotcrete pipe. The machine was downright fast for being such a large hoe. The crew was cutting 25’ to invert, had a 385B following the 1250 just to place shoring, and they were still getting 160’ or 200’ of pipe in the ground in a day. They said that the PC-1250 facilitated almost one more stick of pipe a day versus the 5110B; which ran right at 160’ of pipe per day in the same settings.
I have run a Hitachi 1200; and I wasn’t overly impressed in truck loading production settings. For being a 238,000lb excavator, just 45,960lbs lighter than a 5110B, with a 10yd bucket; it had a lot of hop. What I really disliked was how it balanced. The narrow tracks on a seemingly grossly undersized undercarriage just made the machine feel uncomfortable to me. I never could get it feel really solid and eliminate all rocking motion.
In lighter material, and pipe-laying applications it handled fairly well. From talking to the operators from Kiewit’s Pipeline Division crews, they said with the smaller buckets (8.5-9.5yd) they did like the Hitachi, but not as much as the PC-1250’s, which is what they currently run on the pipeline crews.
In production settings loading trucks (773’s) the Hitachi had some bad hop, even on well graded (dozer built) load-out benches. If swinging less than 40 degrees from straight forward it handled alright, but if going much past that (haul truck had pulled a little too far forward) the machine would have problems with over swinging and you’d start to get some hop from the backside track. Nothing worse than starting to uncurl the bucket and ending up swinging too far and losing some of the material onto the canopy rock guard rail; it’s unsafe and it really rattles the operators (and it’s never good to **** off your truck drivers).
Over swinging and backside track-hop are two of the biggest killers to efficiency in production settings with the larger excavators. In utilities excavation, doing large pipeline work, excavators are typically packing smaller buckets and manage them better. With the larger capacity buckets for high production settings, the machine still needs to handle the bucket well enough to prevent from things like hop, over swinging, etc. I wasn’t impressed with the Hitachi for these reasons.
The CAT 5130B was alright for a shovel, but it didn’t do as good of a job filling the shoes of its little brother the 5110B. Its cycle speeds weren’t as even as I would have liked. In a production setting: face loading overburden into 785’s; the 5130 had sufficient break-out force for relatively hard rock. But with slow stick-lift settings (for peak break-out force) if you had the bucket filled about ½ way up during your rise, once you broke out of the face and began swinging, the machine would swing so fast that you’d often have to stop your swing before getting to the truck to let the stick raise high enough to clear the sides of the bed and then recontinue swinging. This really killed production and made for some close calls on swinging the bucket into the backside of the truck.
What I really liked about the 5130B was the power it had in the stick. If getting into some larger (5’+ rocks) in the face as you were loading, you could open the bucket and make some “ripping†passes to break material free while waiting as your next truck backed in. The 5130B would tear through just about anything. Even if you took an aggressive bite into the face, as the stick would slow down in the face, it was actually hard to make it come to a stop. The machine had so much power it would keep breaking through. It also remained very stable and planted firmly on the floor regardless of how hard you bit into the face. I was very impressed with the machine for this reason.
The one downside to all the power was you would occasionally get some larger rocks loading into the bucket that wouldn’t fall through while dumping into the truck, you’d occasionally lose them off the top of the bucket while trying to swing back off the truck to drop them on the floor (back to rattling truck drivers; no good).
The 5130B ME was a good excavator and really excels in production loading 777’s. The controls felt much smoother and more balanced than the FS version to me. It handled very well even if swinging a full 45 degrees over the side of the tracks to load a truck. Turn-out times on 777’s were FAST.
The only thing I really didn’t like was the really high shovel cab set-up. If working on a flat bench it was fine, but if flipping sideways to pull down a slope the height of the cab made visibility difficult. If you swing sideways it was alright, but pulling slopes in rock material resulted in too little weight over the bucket, lifting the track. If you put the bucket down, flipped the tracks sideways (which I found to feel very unstable in that machine) and then began pulling down the slope grade, the machine had optimum power for it, but if sitting at an angle, the visibility was poor.
The PC1800 was a very decent machine for small shovel. Cycle speeds were downright fast for being a shovel. The controls were smooth, and the machine straight-up cycled well. It’s turn-out times on 777’s were fast. Less than 3 minutes if I recall correctly. I didn’t run one with a backhoe stick, so I don’t know how it would compare to a PC2000 with a backhoe stick.
The thing I really didn’t like about the PC1800 was when making any “ripping†passes; the back end of the machine would actually lift up if you took a deep bite. Not a good feeling when you’re sitting in a machine 21’ off the ground. And when the bucket breaks free and the back of your tracks fall 2-3’; it really jars you and the machine.
The PC4000 was something else. There’s nothing quite like sitting in the seat of a machine that large. It was huge and had the power to match. It was slow, but all shovels are. I only got to spend one night shift in a mine running it and I’ve never run any other machine that large, so I really don’t have anything to compare it to. All I know is that it is one sweet machine to run.
is a bit of overkill.
