Contractor wipes out rain delay

Located about 300 km northwest of Winnipeg, the town of Dauphin is home to a population of nearly 8,000 and is proud of its nickname, "City of Sunshine."  Darren Minaker, owner of Outdoor Solutions Ltd., (OSL), find that nickname particularly ironic, given what they've been through on a recent sports complex project.

“We are taking what was once about 30 acres of farmland and transforming it into four ball diamonds, a soccer pitch and some parking lots to support the complex. Because of heavy rains, we have never worked more than three consecutive days resulting in us losing roughly four and a half weeks of production—better than half the length of the project itself. Yet, despite all that delay, I have no doubt we are still going to meet our scheduled completion date and my level of confidence can be traced directly to the job our GPS equipment is doing for us.”

That gear includes a Topcon base and rover, an X63 machine control system for their Cat 320 excavator and Topcon’s newest 3D-MC² machine control system, on a Cat D4H dozer. The firm also rented an indicate-only 3Di GPS+ system (also from Topcon) for a K-Tek scraper which is being used at Dauphin. All the positioning equipment was purchased through the Calgary office of Brandt.