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Filling a hole in the marketplace
Page 70
Page 71
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Digging holes for telegraph poles is demanding but digging down into granite comes between a rock and a hard place. To solve the problem you need to be inventive and unafraid to spend some cash.
If you had spent as long as Paddy O'Connor has digging holes for telegraphs poles then an opportunity to do the job properly would be grabbed with both hands. For years, burrowing down into granite to stick up telegraph poles has been a problem for both British Telecom and its contractors the length of the country.
When O'Connor started up five years ago in Sheffield as a subcontractor with three people and a van, little did he know he would eventually be supplying the answer. In 1999 he moved the operation to Durham to take on the north-eastern contracting work for BT, before buying out the north-west contractor last year.
When BT did its own work it sourced specialist pole-erector trucks direct from the manufacturers, buying them outright.When it started to contract out,subbies looking for the right vehicles were snapping them up as quickly as possible.
Soon demand outstripped supply and prices soared. O'Connor felt prices rose too high and decided to source from elsewhere. He turned to Jim Warburton at IvecoTrucks Used Vehicle Centre,Middlewich."I saw Jim advertise some 7.5-tonne, purpose-built trucks so we bought those," he says.
The truck for the job When BT-speceed vehicles dried up O'Connor bought used 7.5-tonne chassis cabs from Middlewich before sending them to North-West uppers for Chris Nuttal to fit bespoke bodies. He has started to renew that initial fleet with more used vehicles including an 18-tonne Iveco 180E18.Warburton has provided all 36 trucks on the fleet.
When O'Connor arrived at the Penrith site in Cumbria 14 months ago, he found a backlog of work where granite-based sites were stopping conventional drills in their tracks. "Nothing was happening, loads of work was suspended because there was nothing available that could penetrate solid rock," says O'Connor.
Joining the parts
He went looking for a suitable drill and came up with a compressed-air jack-hammer drill with tungsten bits fitted into a solid cast-iron head 4nd operated by an Atlas erane.Then Warburton and Nuttal got together to solve the logistics of attaching it to a second-hand 13-tonne 4x4 Iveco Cargo.
They spent the following 12 months trialling it and now, over the past eight weeks. O'Connor is starting to reap the benefits of cornering a market.The backlog is gone and the vehicle, complete with driver and banks man, is now virtually on tour, visiting the 25 three-man teams and drilling into granite and rock with ease wherever it is needed.
"It's got to the stage already where we are doing BT's emergency work as well,he says. "What was before an impossible job can now be done in about 12 minutes."
But O'Connor, a former professional hockey player with Durham and Newcastle, is not stopping there.A second rock hole drill is on its way and he knows where the opportunities for the product lie."We have not marketed the product yet but there will he a demand for this across the country:There is solid impenetrable rock from Cornwall up to Scotland causing problems for contractors," he adds.
For Warhurton, who sold the vehicles to O'Connor, the "ground-breaking" project has heensomething special:"It's been amazing getting involved with something like this. You sell fleet vehicles day in,day out, but this is something else altogether." •