A Doosan DX300LCA excavator equipped with an MB Crusher BF90.3 MB bucket crusher crushes material for platforming at a building site in Centurion, South Africa.

Riviera Hire, a Gauteng, South Africa-based plant-hire company says its excavator and bucket crusher for hire solution is proving to be an ideal combination for local demolition, backfill, platforming and general small-scale crushing applications.

Filippo Bevilacqua, owner of Riviera Hire, believes that a machine that does more on its own is a boon on site. Based on this approach, he believes the company’s approach of hiring out earthmoving machines with attachments is proving to be a big benefit for contractors. This allows them to use the very same machine for an array of job functions on site, while hiring all their equipment needs from one supplier.

One combination proving to be valuable is that of an excavator with a crusher bucket. Riviera Hire hires out a 30 tonne Doosan DX300LCA excavator with an MB Crusher BF90.3 MB bucket crusher. A Caterpillar 20t C20 excavator goes together with an Atlas Copco BC1500 crusher bucket. The BF90.3 can crush up to 40m³ per hour while the BC1500 crushes up to 25m³ depending on applications. Ideally, this solution is cost-effective for crushing jobs of up to 5 000m³, according to Joy Slotow, sales manager at Riviera Hire.

Versatility and cost reduction are the features making the crusher bucket solution famous with local contractors.

Riviera Hire started hiring out bucket crushers on excavators at the end of August last year. To date, this solution has successfully completed a total of nine projects and counting. Proof of the popularity of this combination is that these machines are fully booked for the next few months and are moving from one job to the other. The increased demand might also mean that Riviera will need to expand its fleet of excavators running with crusher buckets.

They are being used in different applications from demolition, building rubble, rock and sand backfill through to concrete and railway slippers. “We have had the excavator and bucket crusher solution operating on a string of operations. We have had it out to contractors doing pipelines who have material next to the side of trenches which they needed to crush and backfill,” says Bevilacqua. “We have had it with people crushing building rubble. It has also been used on a very hard carbon-based waste crushing application by a leading waste disposal company,” he adds.

At the Centurion site, the excavator and bucket crusher combination is used to crush material for platforming.

Lucinda van der Linde, hiring sales executive at Riviera Hire, says this solution has been a definite success wherever it has been hired out. “We have had quite good feedback. It’s much cheaper to operate than a mobile crusher,” she says. For example, at a carbon-based rock crushing site in Vanderbijlpark, the contractor initially used a jaw crusher to crush this hard waste rock. “The problem was that the material was so hard that more often it would block the jaws. We sent out an excavator with a crusher bucket and they were quite impressed,” says Bevilacqua, noting that the bigger advantage in this application was that in case of any blockage, they could easily take out the crusher bucket and shake it to unblock it.

Versatility and cost reduction are the features making the crusher bucket solution famous with local contractors. Slotow reasons that the establishment costs of a mobile crusher and the fact that you need another piece of equipment to feed it makes a crusher bucket a whole lot cheaper to run, especially where you have a repeat of the same application.

Equipment Africa says: When economic conditions are tough, finding cost-effective plant solutions to service the few and far between construction contracts is of utmost significance. Based on this understanding, Gauteng, South Africa-based plant hire company Riviera Hire’s excavator and bucket crusher for hire solution is proving to be an ideal combination for local demolition, backfill, platforming and general small-scale crushing applications.