Tracc Civil has been growing rapidly as a significant player in the Western Australian civil construction industry. Its work with John Deere has aided the company’s expansion.
Tracc Civil seeks to create a legacy in the civil construction industry. It wants to become the contractor of choice by being the most versatile contractor with the highest quality levels across multiple areas. This comes about from completing all its works in-house, as well as turnkey projects under stringent environmental conditions and time frames.
Craig Risbey has been in the civil construction industry for about 45 years. He’s seen a lot of changes in the industry and is the Operations Manager for Tracc Civil.
“When I first started out, I had just done an apprenticeship to become a plumber,” Risbey says. “However, once I finished my apprenticeship, I decided that I didn’t really like that. I moved over to the civil engineering and construction industry. I’ve been there ever since, which was probably about 45 years ago.”
Tracc Civil uses its organisational and management capacity to successfully complete its contracts in accordance with its client’s requirements. It has an outstanding reputation as a specialist civil works contractor, which gives Tracc Civil the confidence to deliver quality through expertise.
Industry changing
Throughout his time in the industry, Risbey has seen many changes. One of those key changes is the increased technical abilities of devices and machines.
“10 years ago, Tracc Civil might have had a couple of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) at best,” he says. “Now, all our graders, loaders, and scrapers are run on GPS control. That’s the way the industry is moving, and we’ve definitely embraced that.”
As a West Australian employer, such technological developments mitigate some of the challenges of employing qualified staff.
“The mining industry tends to suck up a lot of labour that we would otherwise employ,” Risbey says. “We can’t afford to go pegging everywhere because we just don’t have the staff to do so. The GPS-operated machines are an enormous help in getting everything done in a timely manner.”
SmartGrade
John Deere’s SmartGrade technology is a 3D mastless integrated grade control system. SmartGrade motor graders are fully integrated and calibrated at John Deere’s factory in the United States.
The system is incorporated through all the machine’s structures and software, delivering precise grading performance while eliminating masts and cables. SmartGrade is also capable of running other Topcon grading technologies such as laser, sonic, millimetre GPS (mmGPS), and local position system (LPS).
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“The level of tolerance with a John Deere SmartGrade grader is within five millimetres,” Risbey says. “A few years ago, that tolerance was more like 30 to 40 millimetres, and you just can’t build a road with such a large tolerance. We can do everything now.”
Tracc Civil purchased its first grader from John Deere via local distributor AFGRI. At the time, AFGRI did not support the SmartGrade system. Once the company had the products and the training, Risbey was keen to take on the products as long as AFGRI could support the product.
“AFGRI had its SmartGrade experts on site most days while we were trying to calibrate it and get it working correctly,” he says. “They would download a file at the end of the day and send it to John Deere headquarters in the United States. John Deere would replicate the problem in their test area and send a file back with the adjustments ready to load into the machine at 7:00 in the morning, ready for work.
“They did this for over a month with one of our final trim operators, Paul. Paul likes everything to work perfectly and made sure the system worked perfectly, so they had their work cut out to get it right. They got the system working perfectly.”
After purchasing the 672GP with a Premium Circle, which improves accuracy and reduces maintenance costs, Tracc Civil has since bought a mix of nine 672GP, 772 and 772GP graders, along with two 850 dozers.
“We are moving to a pegless system, where all our machines are on GPS,” Risbey says. “This cuts down the amount of time on site by increasing production and reducing costs. Our project in Serpentine (southeast of Perth) has us running the 850 dozer with SmartGrade doing all the box-outs and V-drains for the roads. The graders follow up on the final trimming of the subgrade before we install the limestone subbase and base course layers.”
Risbey says he’s keen to expand Tracc Civil’s fleet as the company continues to grow.
“We will continue to invest in the graders as we seek to replace the older machines in our fleet. We are also looking at the bigger dozers from the John Deere collection. We will probably with the 1050K FT4 Crawler Dozer, and then expand from there.”
This article was originally published in the November edition of our magazine. To read the magazine, click here.