Custom crushing and screening contractors lead a nomadic business life. They take their crushing and screening plants from place to place, work on a site for a short period of time and then move on to the next project.
However, BRD LLC Crushing & Screening, which operates several crushing plants at various sites across New England, is working at an unusual site — a quarry. The Fairfield Research Management Inc. quarry located in Brookfield, CT, contracted BRD to custom crush and screen rock at the quarry.
Because of the need for mobility, custom crushing contractors do not usually own large equipment. They use the smaller crushers that are easily transported from work site to work site. Due to the size of the quarry project, BRD needed to generate large production volumes that could not be accomplished with the “normal” portable crushing spreads.
To meet the challenges of the quarry project, BRD went to its equipment dealer, Thompson Equipment, of Lewiston, ME, and Bob Olivadoti, to purchase the crushing and screening equipment it needed to attain the required crushing spreads.
The crushing spread set up begins with a Pioneer 3352 portable jaw as the primary crusher that feeds to a JCI portable 8 by 20 triple-deck screener. Materials from the top deck of the JCI are oversized and fed to a JCI Kodiak 400HP cone portable plant. The product from the Kodiak is then conveyed back to the JCI 8 by 20 triple-deck screener. Materials coming from the middle deck are a finished product and materials coming from the bottom deck are re-processed by a JCI portable 6 by 20 triple-deck screener.
“On large scale jobs such as this, our cost per ton of product produced drops dramatically. To bring this type of setup to a job, we need to be looking at processing at least 100,000 tons of material to justify bringing this type of equipment in,” explained Doug King, BRD superintendent.
The Fairfield site is producing one-and-a-quarter in. stone, three-quarter in. stone, half-in. stone, three-eighths-in. stone and stone dust, all of which is sold to local contractors and municipalities. Hourly production rates range between 400 and 450 tons per hour, depending on the materials being produced and the type of rock that is being processed. However, King believes that the plant could increase its capacity to 500 tons per hour if the trucking cycle of rock to the crusher could be faster.
“Reliability has been wonderful and anytime there have been any issues Thompson and Kolberg-Pioneer have stepped up. Bob Olivadoti works closely with us in evaluating our needs and helping us design each spread,” King said.
“We have been very happy with the products that we have received from the Kolberg-Pioneer group. We have purchased equipment through Bob Olivadoti with Thompson Equipment over the past four years. We continue to buy from them so obviously we must be happy. Kolberg-Pioneer gives us a good product and Thompson gives our account good service,” said Doug King, BRD superintendent.
According to King, BRD has been at the Fairfield quarry since February and has been producing processed materials at 500 tons per hour. Due to weather conditions, the crushing and screening will be in operation six months a year with the production projections of 400,000 tons per year.
Explaining the benefits of having BRD doing the custom crushing and screening at the quarry, King said, “The advantage to Fairfield is that they can fix their cost. They know exactly what our [BRD] per ton charges will be to them. It takes all of the cost variables out of the picture for Fairfield.”
BRD LLC, of West Suffield, CT, is a spin-off of Moose Head Harvesting Inc. in Lincoln, NH, which is a landclearing and tree harvesting company. It expanded into custom crushing under the name of BRD LLC 11 years ago.
In addition to the Fairfield site, the company is working on a Connecticut Department of Transportation job, a 100,000-ton processing job for Empire Paving in Middleton, CT, and a 50,000-ton processing job for the Richards Corp. in Danbury, CT, using a Pioneer 3042 and a Kodiak 300 closed-circuit plant.
This story also appears on Aggregate Equipment Guide.
Today's top stories
