Cavaliere Industries Finds Missing Piece of Conveyor Puzzle

Tue April 27, 2010
Aggregate Equipment Guide

Cavaliere Onsite Recycling’s mid-sized Rubble Master portable, tracked impact crushers have enabled the company to grow an onsite recycling business that can handle processing concrete, asphalt and stone in tight spots.

DJ Cavaliere, operations manager, typically used a three-man crew at these portable recycling spreads: One man on the ground keeps the Rubble Master unit running at its highest efficiency, and who is constantly checking for any safety concerns. The second man is operating either an excavator or a loader that is feeding the hopper of the Rubble Master machine. The third individual is operating a rubber tired loader that is stockpiling finished material. The conveyor that feeds material from any portable crushing plant is not particularly high and does not allow for large stockpiling, so the operator with the rubber tired loader is necessary if there is any measurable volume of material to be processed.

A portable conveyor system would allow Cavaliere to cut that crew by one-third.

“I have always been aware that a portable conveyor system could eliminate the need of the loader and operator, but I have never really seen one that fits my needs. Keep in mind that anything that I would use as a conveyor would need to be very portable. In my mind when I envision a portable conveyor I see an oversized monster with a broken axle that is difficult to load or unload from a trailer, or is not particularly road worthy to pull over the highway from site to site. What we really want to do is to load our entire operation onto the back of a lowboy and head down the road to the next job site,” he said.

Cavaliere found what he was looking for in an issue of Construction Equipment Guide.

“Several months ago I was reading through the most recent copy of Construction Equipment Guide and my eye caught a full page ad from a company called Anaconda Conveyors USA who was selling portable tracked, self-propelled conveyors. I immediately saw that these conveyors were the missing part of the puzzle that I was looking for. A conveyor that could easily be loaded and unloaded onto the trailer and set up at the site by one person with no additional piece of equipment needed to move the conveyor around the job site, thus completely eliminating the need for me to have a rubber tired loader or an operator on the job and effectively saving me the cost of one laborer and one loader per job.”

Cavaliere then purchased an Anaconda TR50 and TR60 track driven conveyor. The TR60 comes equipped with 10 ft. (3 m) hydraulic foldout. He was immediately impressed with the heavy steel frame construction of both units.

“In my opinion you could look at the machines and tell that they were overbuilt and nearly over engineered; very, very heavy with a high quality paint job; much more rugged than anything that we would put the machines through. With the TR60 we are able to make a stockpile that is 27-foot 4-inches tall and holds 1100 cubic yards of material.

“We also look at this machine as an improvement in the safety area. These conveyors are definitely much safer to transport, load and unload; and any time that you have one less operator, driving one less loader on a job site, that job site has become a safer environment.”

Cavaliere also was saving money with his new equipment.

“The new conveyor costs less than one quarter of the cost of a rubber tired loader, and of course you have the fuel costs of running that loader all day. The Anaconda conveyors come with the option of being hydraulically driven or electrically driven, which is great for us because the Rubble Master is powered by electric motors. Meaning that if we are in a job application where we would want to use an Anaconda wheeled conveyor instead of the self-propelled units that wheeled conveyor can be powered from the electric motors of our Rubble Master,” he said.

“One final advantage of using the Anaconda conveyor system versus stockpiling with a wheel loader is that we operate in an overdeveloped metropolitan area, which means we are quite often working in very tight spots. The footprint of a stockpile from conveying system is much smaller than the footprint from the stockpile of a rubber tired loader. The conveyor makes a taller, narrower pile, thus taking up less space on the job site.”

About Cavaliere Industries

Cavaliere Industries was founded in 1955 by Frank Cavaliere and was known at the time as C & P Excavating Contractors Inc. During the 1960’s the company grew as a utility contractor, working largely for the Southern New England Telephone Company, Stamford Water Company, and Northeast Utilities. In the late 1980’s the company expanded into contract milling with the purchase of one Wirtgen milling machine, which later grew into a fleet of milling machines. In 2007 the company identified the need to address a growing niche within the construction industry and started Cavaliere Onsite Recycling.

In 2007, Cavaliere Industries was on a demolition job where it had accumulated 4,000 tons of product that needed to be recycled. It hired out a recycling subcontractor to come in and do the job, who proceeded to bring in a rather large spread of portable crushing and screening equipment. The equipment certainly did the job, but to DJ Cavaliere it seemed like far more equipment that was far more cumbersome than necessary for that type of job. This experience also led him to believe that there was a market in New England and the New York City area for an onsite recycling company that offered smaller, more compact equipment, which was capable of more efficiently completing these types of jobs.

Today the company is running a fleet of three Rubble Master machines and offers contract recycling in an area that includes metro New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.

For more information, visit www.cavaliereonsite.com or www.anacondausa.com.

This story also appears on Construction Equipment Guide.