For Throwback Thursday, REL looks back to 1999 and the beginning of building material handling equipment.
A company came to us with the problem of trying to remove pipes with a 32” diameter, 50’ long, half-full of sand, and weighing approximately five tons. They wanted to be able to resell the pipes as either a reusable product or as scrap. The sand that was in the pipes had to stay on the inside of the dam.
When other methods were tried, it was too costly with low production. It was taking three workers and a crane to do 3 to 7 pieces of pipe in an 8 hour shift. The workers had to crawl into the pipe and shovel the sand out in order to save the pipes and keep the sand in the dam.
With REL’s custom designed and manufactured system, nicknamed “the Snatcher”, 11 miles of pipe were removed in one week and hauled to the loading area with only 2 workers and the sand stayed in the dam! All the pipes were salvaged and resold. “the Snatcher” was mounted on a 245 Catapiller excavator.
This was the start of our equipment build era.
