Page 14 • June 16, 2021 • www.constructionequipmentguide.com • CONSTRUCTION EQUIPMENT GUIDE
New Tools Help Ideal Landscaping ‘Make the Grade’ By Eric Olson CEG CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
One thing is certain about Ideal Landscaping’s project at Hoover Road Park in Durham, N.C.: The Triangle company employs some of the best tools on the market to perform its grading project at the 50-acre soccer park. The 30-year-old commercial landscape contracting firm is based in nearby Holly Springs, southwest of Raleigh. Currently, Ideal Landscaping is working in Durham to install irrigation systems underneath four soccer fields. The family-owned landscaper is a subcontractor to Skanska USA, along with Raleigh-based Fred Smith Construction, the provider of the project’s subgrade. Skanska is the prime contractor for the $9.5 million upgrade to the park with the goal of making it a tournament level facility. “What we had to do was bring in all our underground irrigation, 6-inch mainline running into 2.5-inch valves, from which run various size lines ranging from 2.5-inch pipes down to one-inch lines,” said Cody Byrd, the install supervisor of Ideal Landscaping. “And when digging up subgrade, we must also maintain the subgrades because there’s so much drainage on this field. That means that we are using all our machines to slope everything back down to where we started after the pipes are installed. Eventually, after the irrigation and drainage is in place, I have to add 6 inches to that subgrade for the playing surface.” He added that besides installing the irrigation system, the
Cody Byrd (L), install supervisor of Ideal Landscaping, and Bob Hendrick of SITECH Precision in Raleigh.
drainage has been engineered to where a 12-in. trunk line has been positioned around the soccer fields, along with 2-in. pipes placed every 10 ft. on center. “We’re putting engineered soil on top of it that also drains very well, about 8 inches of water an hour,” Byrd said. “The idea is to allow the teams to be able to play on these field after a heavy rain.” According to the city of Durham website, the Hoover Road Park improvement project should be completed this fall.
Cody Byrd, the install supervisor of Ideal Landscaping, works the Trimble operating screen inside the Caterpillar 299D3 compact track loader.
Combo of Systems Makes Byrd’s Job Easier With an eye toward precision grading at the site, Ideal Landscaping’s prime piece of equipment is a Caterpillar 299D3, the manufacturer’s newest compact track loader featuring a high-flow XPS hydraulics system. The contracting firm acquired the Cat loader via its long-standing partnership with Raleigh’s Gregory Poole Cat distributorship. Byrd’s new machine also is fitted with a Cat BB124 box blade on the front end of the loader designed for grading and leveling. Operators can use the box blade both manually and automatically with the use of laser or GPS grading systems.
That last option is key to Ideal Landscaping’s entire operation at Hoover Road Park, Byrd said, because he also enlisted the services of the Raleigh office of SITECH Precision to equip him with the kind of technology that all but guarantees total accuracy in his crews’ irrigation installation effort. SITECH is a leading construction technology provider in North Carolina. Its experts can assist contractors using GPS systems in solving many of their issues on site with Trimble Heavy Industry machine control solutions. As an authorized Trimble distributor, SITECH offers Trimble products that can establish accurate grade control and site positioning systems, machine monitoring, construction software and wireless and Internet-based infrastructure. “I have a Trimble Zephyr 3 base station that we placed near the gate coming into the job site,” said Byrd. “The single mast on the Cat’s box blade is equipped with Trimble’s GCS900 3D system, and it is also used to get my grade back to subgrade.” The Zephyr base station receives GPS data from satellites in orbit and transmits to Byrd’s equipment in the field. The Trimble kit he purchased from SITECH also gives him a lightweight SPS986 Zephyr rover mounted on a pole so that he can walk the site to check the grades and do his field layouts for the irrigation and the drainage. In addition, the Trimble T7 field computer Byrd carries with him, about the size of an iPad, but much thicker, he said, is connected to each of the other Trimble systems on site. “The mast on the Cat loader’s box blade works in tandem with the Trimble Zephyr GPS system to guide the orientation see IDEAL page 64
