As a marine construction firm in New England, Riverside and Pickering Marine Contractors works hard to meet customer demands while keeping a watchful eye on the fast-changing weather along the Atlantic Ocean.

“Anything we can do to be more efficient and to deal with Mother Nature — which is both our enemy and our friend — is beneficial,” said Ken Anderson, who owns the Eliot, Maine, firm with his brother, Doug. “And that’s why our VersaHandler V417 telescopic tool carrier is so valuable. In just one phase of our business, it has cut our time in half. Believe me, that’s significant.”

The company does commercial and residential marine construction for waterfront communities in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Specialties include piers, docks, floats, wharves, pile driving, landscape construction and design, seawalls, dock repairs and dock rebuilds.

While the Andersons continue to find more applications for the VersaHandler V417, the major use — and the real time-saver — is handling the pilings needed in building docks.

“Our skid steer loader, a very versatile machine, was having difficulty picking up more than one of the pilings at a time,” Ken said. “It was a slow process to move a dozen or more pilings around in order to find the one we needed.”

After reading about the Bobcat line of telescopics in WorkSaver magazine, he contacted Bobcat of New Hampshire.

“We selected the V417 because of its compact size and good lift capacity,” Ken said. “Using a Bobcat grapple, we can move two to four pilings at a time. We can telescope the grapple out 17 feet to the back of the pile to pick up the piling we want. Loading a barge to head out is completed in half the time it previously took.”

The V417 is used in both the yard and at job sites.

“Most of our waterside work is done with cranes and barges,” Doug said. “On a recent job, however, the water was too shallow to use our barge so we could not bring in the crane to set the pilings. We put the auger attachment on the V417, drove across the customer’s property to auger in the pilings. We were able to telescope over the water to do the work. That was much easier than doing it by hand.”

The family-owned business takes pride in its workmanship, quality products, affordability and service — and in always having an Anderson on the job. Based on its ability and versatility, customers are likely to be seeing more of the Bobcat V417 as well.

This story was reprinted with permission from WorkSaver Magazine, Spring 2010 Issue.

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