Contractor benefits from equipment versatility

Founded in 1963, Kinsley Construction takes great pride in the variety of its work throughout the mid-Atlantic states. Kinsley handles construction and repair of roads, bridges and parking lots, as well as actual construction and site work for a range of commercial, retail, educational, manufacturing, warehousing and government buildings and complexes. The variety of work requires versatile, reliable, high-productivity equipment, including a fleet of excavators. The ability to get equipment to jobsites quickly, and then to move around the sites as needed, is critical.

Kinsley Construction's fleet of Gradall excavators with highway-speed undercarriages lets the company move productive equipment from the equipment yard to jobsites very quickly, without the need for, and expense of, a lowboy trailer. On paving jobs throughout the massive Civil War battlefields, an XL 4100 III model with a full-tilting boom is used to back up the edge of the asphalt pavement with a mixture of stone and soil, creating a smooth, finished berm.

Operator Mark Brazeal said the excavator makes the process much faster because it can be repositioned from the upper cab and the stable undercarriage does not require outriggers.

"I can roll while I'm grading, and that's great," he said, adding that he can cover up to 2,800 ft per day.

He also enjoyed the new bucket shake feature that helps spread the dirt more evenly, and he appreciated the new electronic controls, which he said make boom movements faster and smoother. A few days earlier, Brazeal used the same machine to create a water line trench using a 30-in. excavating bucket. Again, because he was able to reposition the machine from the upperstructure cab, he sometimes could complete 400 ft of trenching in a day.