Think about what you could do with an extra four hours during your work week. Or, perhaps with an extra three or four days each month. Pitsch Wrecking in Grand Rapids, MI, is finding out the extra hours mean more time in the field.

The company's scrap buckets, in particular, take serious job-site abuse and regularly sustain the damage to show for it. From tearing down buildings to recycling the concrete salvaged from the rubble, parts and pieces of this equipment crack, break off, and just wear away. In fact, it's not uncommon for a bucket to return from a demolition site to the repair shop with eight inches of metal missing from its top surface.

Repairing damage like this can be just as tough, sometimes even tougher. When the buckets are returned to Pitsch's repair shop they are dirty, and often their metal grade is unknown, given the vast fleet of equipment the company owns. Plus, they've usually been welded on multiple times. Two years ago, however, with the help of a trusted welding distributor and Hobart Brothers' gas-shielded flux-cored welding wire — the Tri-Mark TM-811N1 — dirt, broken weldments and mystery metal grades ceased to be a problem.

Wrecking the wreckers

Pitsch Wrecking (officially, Pitsch Companies) started in the demolition and salvaging business long before recycling became a household or corporate buzzword — more than 50 years ago, in fact. They retain a large fleet of heavy demolition equipment at their yard in Grand Rapids, and they operate a concrete recycling and crushing facility in nearby Walker, MI, where they are able to convert concrete from their demolition jobs into valuable road gravel and other multi-purpose stone products.

“We recycle or salvage everything we can from a demolition site — wood, concrete and scrap metal,” says Jon Watts, a repair welder at Pitsch.

Keeping the equipment operating smoothly at the concrete crushing facility depends largely on the handiwork of Watt and fellow repair welder, Eric Voet. But most important, it is their job to ensure that the heavy equipment used each day to tear down everything from old commercial buildings to out-of-date gas stations stays up and running for as long as possible. This is especially the case for the company's buckets, which comprise a large percentage of Pitsch's fleet.

“If a piece of bucket breaks down in the field, especially on an out-of-state job, Pitsch has to rent another one or make temporary repairs in the field,” says Watts. “Either way, it causes downtime.”

When Watts and Voet receive the buckets, they're usually in rough shape and routinely need multiple repairs. These include rebuilding worn parts, reattaching AR (abrasion-resistant) plates, and placing an overlay of hard surfacing to protect the equipment from wear when it goes back into service.

“When you look at a place like Pitsch, this is where welding gets interesting. Not only are they making repairs, they are also fabricating and hard surfacing,” explains Bill England of Purity Cylinder Gases Inc. in Grand Rapids, Pitsch's welding supply distributor. “So there are two distinct challenges to this welding process. One, they have to replace missing parts and build the equipment back up to the correct dimensions; and two, they have to use a welding wire that will resist impact and wear well in the field.”

Previously, Pitsch used both solid welding wire and a hard-surfacing welding wire for its equipment repair and fabrication jobs. However, this wire combination required additional steps, both during the inventory and the welding processes; they'd need to order, store and change multiple wires for each job. More important, the combination also failed to yield the results the company needed to withstand the abuse of its demolition and concrete crushing projects.

“We had welds breaking in the field and equipment that was coming back right after we sent it out,” says Voight. “We'd just keep seeing the same equipment over and over.”

More often than not, the weld failures occurred in the form of cracks caused by the repeated impact of the buckets against metal and other debris the equipment encountered on the demolition site.