Komplet Jaw Crusher Helps N.J. Biz Save Time, Money

Mon December 02, 2024
CEG

For a small family construction company to be able to celebrate 20 years in business is quite an achievement due to the industry's often unforgiving economic realities.

Despite that, Lancha Construction in Monroe Township, N.J., northeast of Trenton, has managed to carve out a niche for itself in the region by staying true to itself as a concrete and paving contractor for the area's different municipalities.

Another factor that has kept Lancha in business is its dedication to hard work, a trait that its co-founder, Rogerio Lancha, brought with him from his native Portugal. Now semi-retired from actively running the company, he has passed on the leadership role to his son, Paul, who was his partner in starting the firm and today serves as its president and owner.

But just because Rogerio Lancha stepped away from overseeing field operations for the construction firm approximately two years ago, that does not mean he has stopped working there. Rather, his son said that the elder Lancha currently oversees the company's yard, where he operates — among other machines — its Komplet K-JC704 mobile jaw crusher.

"To be honest with you, what my father is doing is a good thing because it is a lot less stressful environment for him," Lancha said. "And, of course, being from Portugal, he did not want to leave the field so soon."

As a small, family-run operation, Lancha Construction is a fully unionized general contractor specializing in utility work, including concrete drainage, curb and gutter and sidewalk jobs, in addition to road improvements and paving projects.

It employs eight people in the field full-time and hires subcontractors to handle the paving jobs for its clients, 99 percent of which are small New Jersey municipalities.

"With our being located in central Jersey, we usually travel within an hour radius of Monroe Township," Lancha said. "We can go in any direction; we do a lot of jobs in Union Township, closer to Newark, or to Old Bridge, or as far east as Rumson Township. We're all over the place."

Making RCA Is Win-Win for Lancha

Much of Lancha Construction's work involves breaking up old concrete surfaces and, typically, at the end of each work day, Paul Lancha's crews must dispose of several truckloads of material that cannot be brought back to its yard.

Rather than paying someone to haul off the entire amount of old pavement, the company brings back at least one load to its property each day to be crushed by Rogerio Lancha into 0.75-in.-size recycled crushed aggregate, or RCA.

"What that does is keep Dad busy," Lancha said. "He will go crazy if he is not busy."

By doing so, he said, Lancha Construction is not only able to reuse the crushed concrete for its own projects, such as re-grading underneath curbs, sidewalks and pavement, but save substantial amounts of time and money for the budget-conscious family company and allow it to further its environmentally friendly practices.

"So, we are saving, let's say, $200 to bring a load in, and another $200 to take it out — that is $400 a day," Lancha said. "It does not seem like a lot, but it adds up."

The remaining four loads of broken concrete, particularly if they came from a job an hour or more away from the Lancha office, would then be taken to a nearby concrete plant, which would charge the contractor a dumping fee.

"It also saves us time," he added. "For example, at the end of the day, the plants close at 3:30 p.m. If the driver can't make it to one in time, and we have a truck loaded, that would mean he would bring it back here, and the next morning go back to the concrete plant, dispose of that old concrete and pick up new material."

If, instead, that same truck driver comes to the Lancha yard late in the work day and drops off the old concrete to be crushed in time for him to load up RCA the next morning, the repurposed concrete is ready to be used once again at a job site.

"It saves us at least two hours during the day," Lancha said. "Not only are we saving on the material and the material disposal but saving time as well. It has worked out very well for us in that sense."

To help accomplish those savings, and with so much concrete to process, the company purchased a Komplet K-JC704 mobile jaw crusher in January 2023 from the Komplet America master distributor in Hillsborough, N.J.

With it, the elder Lancha is able to process a single load of concrete in just a couple of hours, according to his son.

"We went with a little bigger model, one that was perfect for us because, as I said, we don't sell any material — it is just for us to reuse concrete," said Paul Lancha. "We felt this machine was the right size for us because we are not looking to process very big amounts even though this crusher can do up to 10 loads of material a day. For a small company like us with a small operation, it is perfect."

Lancha Purchases Komplet Jaw Crusher for Its Simplicity

After having used other crushers and screeners in the past, he said that when he and his father were shopping for a new machine, they quickly became impressed with the simplicity of the Komplet jaw crusher's mechanics.

"It is simpler because it is all hydraulic-powered," he said. "There is no electrical generator, and it is easy to maintain."

Another key point in the Komplet jaw crusher's favor, Lancha said, is the relative ease with which it extracts rebar and wire from old concrete. The machine is adept at pulling steel components from the material via its powerful magnetic separator.

That function is an important one for companies like Lancha Construction that often must remove unwanted debris from concrete and pavement.

"Some of it comes with wire mesh, although not a lot of rebar, but we do get that sometimes, too," he said. "We break up concrete into smaller pieces with a hammer excavator before we throw it into the crusher because the pieces are often too big, but you cannot get all the rebar and wire mesh out that way. With the Komplet jaw crusher, the wire and rebar will come through the hopper and as it enters the belt, its magnetic separator extracts it in the end. It is all done very well."

Lancha Construction's own mechanic has been able to keep up with the Komplet's preventive maintenance — about the only service the piece of equipment has needed since the company acquired it almost two years ago.

Although Komplet machinery has been in existence for 25 years, it has only been over the past seven years when it has become known to the U.S. marketplace through Komplet America. Lancha noted that as Komplet is still a relatively new product line in the U.S., he and his technicians are still learning from Komplet America what parts need to be switched out and how often.

"We changed one of the back plates recently because they tend to get worn out more often," he said. "When the problem came up, I called Komplet America because we have a good relationship with them. They are excellent to work with and anything that we have needed so far, they have in stock and, if they didn't, they would order it. They took my mechanic through the process to change the plate, and it was very simple."

His technician was trained by Lancha Construction's Komplet representative shortly after the K-JC704 mobile jaw crusher was purchased and has since received further instructions on how to change other components on the machine.

"They have come down to our facility a couple times and shown my mechanic how the system works so that we can do it ourselves in the future. Like I said, it is not a hard machine to understand and Komplet has been 100 percent helpful with everything."

Among the other equipment in the Lancha Construction fleet are a Kubota KX57 excavator with an FRD hammer attachment that Paul Lancha said is used to break up old cement, and an older John Deere 310-J backhoe that works in the company's yard to load the Komplet crusher.

"We also have three other John Deere backhoes that we use in the field, along with a larger Kubota KX80 model, four Scania dump trucks and two Dynapac rollers, one of which is older that we keep in the yard," he said. "Although we subcontract out much of our paving work, we use the Dynapacs for smaller stuff. Plus, we have both a John Deere and a Bobcat skid steer."

He noted that his crews have used the Scania-brand dump trucks since the company's beginning, and each one of its current fleet of trucks are older models.

"We have a guy up north that rebuilds them up to standard and almost from scratch," Lancha added. "He rebuilds the engines, he rebuilds the transmissions, and he puts new bodies on them, but we have had those for a long time."

Lancha Brings Tremendous Work Ethic to Each Job

Paul Lancha noted that he and his family came from very humble beginnings in Portugal before arriving in the United States just a few decades ago.

"When I came to America, I was 12 years old," he said, adding that his family had lived in the city of Aveiro, near the Atlantic coast.

"After high school I went straight to work with my father, who has been in construction all his life. It was tough because he wanted me to stay in school and I decided not to do that, so he pushed me hard and after a couple of years, I got used to it. I began liking it more and more to the point that I started thinking to myself, ‘This could be something very good if I did my own thing.'

"That was the hunger we had back then," Lancha added. "We wanted to do better things. So, when I was 23 years old, I started my own business to be my own boss and help our family."

As a result, the entire company is made up of extended family members, many of whom are his cousins and uncles.

"In fact, my future son-in-law and all of our subcontractors are in my cousin's company, which does all our paving work," he said.

When Lancha Construction began, it worked on building driveways and concrete steps, but after it became bonded, it moved up to performing municipal projects, a sector of the industry in which both he and his father were experienced.

Eventually, they joined the New Jersey Laborers unions, Locals 472 and 825, and began to take on larger projects. Lancha said they also saw to it that their employees were paid a fair wage and focused their efforts on making the business profitable.

"As I said, we are not a big company, but we do big work and sometimes it's not about the size," he said. "For about the past three years, we decided that we wanted to do more quality work instead of just more work. And by keeping the company compact and having the family involved, we have come up with a better way for us to do the best job for our clients." CEG