KEMROC Chain Cutter EK 100
HIGH SPEED TRENCHING

Under normal circumstances, the Bavarian company Verbautec relies on their own excavator with hydraulic quick-coupler and specialist attachments for trenching projects. However, for a project in the city of Furth, Bavaria, the company rented a KEMROC EK 100 chain cutter as the trenching tool of choice.

The core competencies of Verbautec, a company based in Oberhaching, Bavaria, includes the design, installation and supply of shoring systems. As an additional service to their customers, they also offer a contracting service which allows them to deliver a fully finished product. Using their operator and excavator package, they excavate start and target pits for boreholes, excavate foundations or carry out trenching work. A dedicated range of attachments ensure efficient, cost effective results. In October 2020, Marcel Zipfel, the Plant and Site Manager at Verbautec, was given a week to excavate a 400 m long service trench required for the construction of a new Exhibition Hall near the city of Furth. It was decided to rent a KEMROC EK 100_700 chain cutter attachment for use on their 30 ton excavator. This type of attachment was needed since the ground along the length of the trench had recently been stabilised with a 80 cm deep layer of lime.

Chain cutters from KEMROC have a chain fitted with tungsten carbide tipped picks running between two cutter drums. This allows trenches to be excavated as wide as necessary and as narrow as possible; without costly overcutting which can result from having to swing traditional drum cutters sideways during operation. At the same time, chain cutters are powerful enough to penetrate solid rock. For Verbautec, the lime-stabilised soil offered little resistance to their rental attachment at the trenching project at Furth. Marcel Zipfel estimated that during the one weeklong project, the actual cutting time for the attachment amounted to approximately eight hours. In between, the fully hydraulic quick-exchange coupler was often in use, changing attachments between the chain cutter, the bucket and a compacter. The process for completion of the project was to excavate a length of trench, lay the pipework, then backfill and compact before repeating the process for the next section of trench. One of the main advantages of using the chain cutter in this process was, according to Marcel Zipfel, “The excavated material was so finely grained that we could use it as backfill after laying the pipes, without any additional processing or transportation.”

The specialists from Verbautec are continuously on the road with their fleet of equipment, traveling from job site to job site. However, they do not need a chain cutter attachment every day, so for the project in Furth, they rented the attachment at short notice from B.I.V. Located in the town of Bindlach, B.I.V. are a construction equipment company and a dealer for equipment from KEMROC. They have several customers in the states of Saxonia, Thuringia and Northern Bavaria renting KEMROC chain cutter attachments for trenching and pipeline applications, especially when they unexpectedly hit rock on one of their projects.