Success in business often means changing with the times. Such has been the case with Fall Village, CT’s Conklin Limestone Company, which was founded in 1937 as a manufacturer of agricultural limestone.
For more than 40 years, the limestone quarry served agriculture customers in western Connecticut, eastern New York and western Massachusetts. But by the mid-1980s, Jesse Conklin, grandson of the company’s founder Charlie Conklin, ushered the business into a production diversification program to manufacture a larger variety of limestone aggregate products.
To handle the additional products, Jesse invested more than $250,000 by purchasing a 3-ft. (.9 m) Telsmith cone crusher and two 5 by 16 screeners (one a double and the other a triple), along with miscellaneous conveyors.
The business, however, has remained small in terms of the number of people it employs, and Jesse recently looked at trying to increase his company’s efficiency. After speaking with a friend from Carver Construction, in Albany, NY, Jesse became convinced that to improve efficiency, he needed to put a portable crusher within the quarry to eliminate hauling shot rock to the cone crusher.
Jesse, however, could not justify purchasing a portable, wheeled crusher because he believed that he needed the flexibility and mobility of a tracked machine.
“With only five or six employees, it is imperative for us to economize our manpower,” he said. “A portable tracked crusher can go to the bottom of our quarry and can be set up and operating in less than 20 minutes.”
Jesse called Ron Jolicoeur, sales representative of Whitney & Son, in Fitchburg, MA, and was soon the owner of a new Metso LT95 portable tracked crusher.
What really sold the L T95 to Conklin was the machine’s many features.
“The wiring and accessibility to service parts in the machine is by far better than others that we looked at,” Conklin said. “I also appreciated that the jaw is mounted on rubber, which takes a lot of shock out of the machine’s operation. Another outstanding feature is the fully hydraulic adjustable jaw, which allows us to adjust our production sizes in just minutes. An added plus to this feature is that the fully-hydraulic jaw allows us to dislodge items from the jaw very quickly.”
Conklin opted to have the LT95 equipped with a screening modular.
“This feature allows us to make an item off the top and off the bottom of the conveyor. For instance, we can take a 2-inch minus off the bottom and a 2- through 5-inch product off the top,” he said.
Another option on Conklin’s LT95 is a Rammer hammer that is fully remote-control operated.
“This allows the excavator operator to break down lodged or oversized rocks in the crusher chamber without ever leaving the excavator,” he said. “Or you can use the hammer like a crowbar to dislodge rocks without actually breaking them down.”
Conklin also is doing some custom site crushing work, including breaking up oversized material in local gravel beds and working on some area housing sites. “The machine weighs 39 tons with the hammer. It’s not over width and it’s not over height, which makes transportation a breeze,” he said.
Not only has Conklin been happy with the performance of the LT95, he’s also been pleased with Whitney & Son’s performance.
“Our experience with Whitney and Son has been excellent,” he said. “They’ve provided tremendous support. If you have a serious problem you can be assured that a service technician is on the way. Whitney gives me tremendous product support through their knowledgeable troubleshooters. When they show up at our site they are armed with computers that can diagnose the problem with the machine very quickly.”
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