Glenn O. Hawbaker, Inc. brings over 60 years of experience to the highway, commercial and residential fields throughout central Pennsylvania. They continue to grow their business by expanding their reputation for safety, quality, service and reliability. That's one of the reasons Glenn O. Hawbaker purchased their first PowerTilt Tilting Coupler and continued to purchase several more for their entire backhoe loader fleet. PowerTilt has changed the way they've approached their grading and excavating business while at the same time positively impacting their bottom line and overall customer satisfaction.
Life before PowerTiltPrior to using PowerTilt, Glenn O. Hawbaker faced two challenges on the job site. Genn O. Hawbaker was using large and expensive Gradall specialty machines to grade and slope and spent extra man-hours to swap these machines in and out of job sites.The large rubber tires on the specialty machines often caused the Gradalls to slide or operators to spin around when a rock was hooked, making for an unstable work environment. With PowerTilt, Hawbaker could keep just one machine on the job site without the expense or logistics involved in scheduling the Gradall excavators between the different job sites.
The Hawbaker crew was also having difficulty with the outriggers on their specialty excavator and backhoe fleet - they had to take their hands off of the controls to tilt the outriggers and move the machine at different angles around the job site. When the outriggers were tilted at an awkward angle, the operators felt uncomfortable and unsafe. When they added the PowerTilts to their existing CASE backhoes, they kept just one machine on the job site to tilt their bucket or attachment instead of moving the entire machine to get the right angle.
“Now with PowerTilt, we’re doing everything on the fly - we tilt and grade at the same time."
Paul Peters, backhoe operator for Glenn O. Hawbaker
Multiple benefits from a single attachment
By switching to PowerTilt, Glenn O. Hawbaker and its customers received a wide range of expected and unexpected benefits.
“We saved on labor, got tasks done faster and safer, and increased the appearance of the end product. What's more, we had the unexpected benefit of people asking us what tool we were using, and how we were getting more work done with less hand work," stated Peters.
The benefits of switching to PowerTilt were:
- Labor savings: Before PowerTilt, Glenn O. Hawbaker did a lot of hand work - touching up the soil and raking the stone off. Now they just grade with PowerTilt and they're done.
- Cost savings: The Hawbaker crew used to swap in their specialty Gradall machines and repeatedly reposition them on the job site. They use fewer machines on the job site and simply tilt the bucket or attachment instead of moving the entire machine, resulting in tasks getting done faster and more efficiently.
- Increase in safety: The specialty excavator machines and backhoes were always unstable with their outriggers on varied slopes. PowerTilt remains on a single machine and they simply tilt the bucket or attachment up to a total of 180 degrees side-to-side swing rotation instead of repositioning the machine.
- Increased efficiency: Before PowerTilt, the work site was uneven and needed manual labor to even out the highest spots. With PowerTilt, they don’t have to prep or rework the site when it’s time to landscape.
Glenn O. Hawbaker uses their PowerTilts on their entire fleet of backhoes to perform a wide range of tasks throughout the construction process, ranging from site preparation, earth excavation, sub-grade placement and grading, utility installation, site concrete, site clean-up and landscaping. Ninety-five percent of the time they use a grading bucket with PowerTilt, whereas five percent of the time they use other attachments.
Peters stated, "I hate to take a PowerTilt off the machine. I can perform a broad range of tasks with a PowerTilt, and it keeps me on the job all the time”.
The most common applications for PowerTilt include:
- Tod soil work: They dress up topsoil behind curbs and sidewalks more smoothly than when they were using manual labor.
- Grading: They can easily create a two percent grade for sidewalks according to the APA specs.
- Pond work: Whether they are building settlement or storm retention ponds, they can easily smooth all the surfaces to make them more attractive.
Glenn O. Hawbaker uses PowerTilt with a variety of attachments in addition to their commonly used five-foot grading buckets to improve their machine's versatility. They first learned about PowerTilt when they noticed a local municipality using a T bucket to dig around pipes. Since then, the Hawbaker crew has used PowerTilt for a variety of specialty applications.
They have used PowerTilt with ripper shanks to rip frozen soil in the winter, or to rip rocks and stumps in tough-to-get corners or ditches. Compactors work equally well with PowerTilt when soil needs to be compressed around utilities or on slopes. PowerTilt has even worked well with hydraulic hammers when they needed to dig footers where there's lots of lime stone in the foundation corners.
Inside Parker’s Helac rotary actuator technology
PowerTilt uses Parker’s innovative sliding-spline operating technology to convert linear piston motion into powerful shaft rotation. Each actuator is composed of a housing and two moving parts — the central shaft and piston. As hydraulic pressure is applied, the piston is displaced axially, while the helical gearing on the piston OD and housing's ring gear cause the simultaneous rotation of the piston. PowerTilt's end caps, seals and bearings all work in tandem to keep debris and other contaminants out of the inner workings of the actuator, prolonging product life and reducing required maintenance.
To learn more about PowerTilt, visit http://solutions.parker.com/powertilt
This article was contributed by Jessica Howisey, marketing communications manager and Daniel Morgado, applications engineer, Helac Business Unit, Cylinder Division.
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