English
Scoop, carry, load … repeat
Winter 2014
For a demanding application that has little room for downtime, a family-owned and operated aggregate company needs a dependable brand of wheel loader. The company looked beyond its existing equipment brands and its comfort zone to an up-and-coming brand in southern Ontario — Doosan — when it purchased its latest model.
At Vicdom Sand and Gravel's operation in Uxbridge, Ontario, a new color of wheel loader stands out from other brands of heavy equipment. A heavy-duty, orange and black Doosan DL550-3 wheel loader — purchased from the local Doosan dealer, Top Lift Enterprises — is making inroads with the owners and its daily operator, as it is utilized six days a week to keep up with demand for the company's aggregate products.
Vicdom Sand and Gravel was started in 1976, but the company's roots date back to 1956 when brothers Domenic and Victor Giordano started Giordano Sand and Gravel. Today, the company is known as Vicdom Sand and Gravel, with several sand and gravel pits and a limestone quarry in southern Ontario. Victor Giordano, who is still a part of the operation, works with sons and nephews Jim, Bruno, Vince and Sam. They estimate that the company owns approximately 5,000 acres and as many as 20 wheel loaders across its multiple locations. The company offers varieties of sand and gravel products, washed materials and limestone products, serving area concrete plants, asphalt plants, road builders, townships and regions.
Much of the material processed at Vicdom Sand and Gravel goes toward infrastructure projects in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The GTA is estimated to have more than six million people living in approximately 2,750 square miles, and the city itself surpassed Chicago earlier this year to become the fourth-largest city in North America, trailing only Mexico City, New York and Los Angeles.
Toronto, like many other major metropolitan areas in North America, is updating its aging infrastructure by repairing or replacing asphalt and concrete roads and bridges, which require aggregate material processed by companies like Vicdom Sand and Gravel in Ontario. According to the Ontario Stone, Sand and Gravel Association, its members supply the majority of the approximately 172 million metric tons of aggregate consumed annually in the province to build and maintain Ontario's infrastructure.
One loader + 10 hours = about 4,000 metric tons of material
Dominic Cina has worked at Vicdom Sand and Gravel for 25 years. He's seen a lot of changes in equipment during his tenure as a heavy equipment operator. Today, Cina's sole machine is the company's DL550-3 wheel loader, which he operates up to 10 hours a day, six days a week. This is his first time operating a Doosan wheel loader and he says the machine is comfortable to operate, provides good production and consumes less fuel than previous wheel loaders that he's operated.
Regarding operator comfort, Cina points to several key features that make his long days less tiresome and improve his overall operator experience.
"It starts with the seat," he says, "which is comfortable with its arm rests. The climate control system is really nice, too. I can set it at whatever temperature I want and it maintains that temperature. I found some other loaders never seem to maintain the temperature."
Operating for an extended time, Cina cites the joystick control as a particularly helpful loader feature.
"The single joystick makes it simple to control the wheel loader's directional movements without using the steering wheel. The machine also has an automatic transmission to shift automatically from lower to higher and higher to lower gears for easy operation. Also, the ride control is nice when I'm traveling at speeds and hit a bump."
Keeping up with production is priority No. 1 for Cina and he says the DL550-3 does everything he needs it to and more. The machine is paired with a 7.5-cubic-yard bucket to load a mixture of sand and crushed stone into trucks, and then the material is transported to a washing plant for further processing.
"What I really like about the DL550 is the torque converter lockup," he says. "When I'm climbing hills, I lock the torque converter and the machine doesn't slow down, it just keeps going up the hill; it doesn't slow down at all on the hills."
Available as an option on the DL300-3 through the DL550-3, the torque converter lockup clutch with five-speed transmission helps Doosan wheel loader operators climb grades easier and faster, increasing productivity as much as 20 percent in stockpiling applications. The option improves gear shifting for faster cycle times during truck loading and boasts high-gear performance during load-and-carry operations. Also contributing to the wheel loader's productivity is the locking front differential, which is standard equipment on the DL550-3, and available as an option for interim Tier 4 Doosan wheel loaders, for improved traction in loose soil.
Cina says the all-around visibility from the DL550-3 is good, which is important for his truck-loading application, where the machine scoops, carries and loads granular materials for its entire workday.
"I'm using the Doosan wheel loader with a bucket to load material into trucks to haul it to our washing plant. These trucks are making about eight loads an hour, and we have two trucks running, so that's 16 loads an hour. They're carrying about 38 metric tons of material, and so that's about 3,500 to 4,000 metric tons a day."
It's understandable why there is little room for downtime.
"We can easily put 30,000 to 40,000 hours on our wheel loaders before we retire them," Giordano says. "We keep our equipment for quite a while, and when we're done with them, there's not much left. Machine longevity and durability are two key factors when we are evaluating equipment."
Significant fuel savings
Paying particular attention to fuel consumption, Cina says the Doosan wheel loader consumes considerably less fuel than the wheel loader he previously operated. He closely monitors the machine's fuel consumption and saves it in a spreadsheet.
"The DL550 is fuel-efficient, too," he says. "I'm only using about 130 to 135 liters a day (there are 4.05 liters per gallon), compared to my old loader, which was using about 160 to 170 liters a day. So it saves about 30 liters a day, and it's running more horsepower than my old loader. The DL550 is a bigger loader, with more horsepower, using less fuel."
When you do the math, the company is saving approximately $36 a day in fuel (cost per liter of $1.21 U.S. dollars). That adds up to a possible $11,232 in annual fuel savings, assuming the wheel loader is operated six days a week or 312 days a year.
First in the area
Giordano says the company's DL550-3 wheel loader was the first Doosan model of this size purchased in the area, and that he has been impressed with its performance and the comments from the operator, Cina. Giordano says his company's previous working relationship with Top Lift Enterprises was important when it was time to purchase a new wheel loader, and when Giordano coordinated equipment demonstrations to decide which brand to buy. Several local heavy equipment dealers brought wheel loaders to the sand and gravel operation for an evaluation.
"We asked the local dealers to bring us a machine, and we compared the Doosan DL550 wheel loader to some other brands," he says. "We put them in the application that we wanted the machine in, we ran them with the same operator, and then we got his feedback on them. We sat down after we evaluated all of the brands and made a decision.
"Bucket size was one of the key characteristics that we looked at, and obviously the comfort of the wheel loader and the engine performance, specifically how much horsepower it had, and breaking power (breakforce), such as breaking into bank (gravel). When it came down to it, for what we were getting with the Doosan wheel loader, we could not justify buying any other machine.
"We were privileged to have the first DL550 in this area. It's worked out very well. I think the application suits it well, and the operator, of course," Giordano concludes.
