PRESSEARTIKEL

Getting the job done much quicker – with less manual labour

Murrhardt-Fornsbach, 11.03.2025

German Civil Engineering company Zehnder Straßenbau GmbH equips excavators with the RotoTop from Holp

 

For nearly nine years, Zehnder Straßenbau from Rudersberg, South-Germany, has been equipping all excavators with a working weight of between 5 and 27.5 tonnes with a RotoTop from Holp. This is not only to save on time-consuming manual work for employees, but also to be able to complete the tasks at hand more efficiently and therefore more economically. Further savings can be made by purchasing cheaper attachments without an own rotation.

 

Zehnder Straßenbau GmbH was founded over 60 years ago in Rudersberg, Swabia, as a family business and is now run by Werner Zehnder and his son, the fourth generation of the Zehnder family. Zehnder works for private, commercial and public clients not only in road construction, but also flexibly undertakes earthworks, paving and asphalt work, sewer construction and, with its special expertise, is also frequently involved in the redevelopment of town centres and city centres.

 

This range of tasks requires a well-equipped machine park, which Werner Zehnder always keeps up to date; he is absolutely open to innovations. The managing director often excavates himself, so he knows what his employees need on sites and which machines help to increase efficiency. So, six of the company's excavators with operating weights of 5 to 27.5 tonnes have been equipped with the RotoTop from Holp. Previously, Zehnder also trialled a tilt rotator and concluded that the cost/benefit ratio had not proved to be very favourable in use, and there were also disadvantages such as the high structure and susceptibility to damage, so that the Holp rotary drive has now become the company's standard.

 

Unrivalled flexibility in sewer construction - hardly any manual work

With the RotoTop, it was very quickly possible to benefit from the advantages, which also convinced his employees: ‘It is very robustly built and proves highly economical thanks to its flexibility.’ Werner Zehnder cannot quantify the savings in concrete figures, but notes that the entire working method has been greatly simplified for the machine operators. In sewer construction in particular, it all depends on the reach, which is only measurably extended by 20 cm with the RotoTop, but the increased flexibility of the RotoTop due to the endlessly rotating bucket leads to a significantly greater reach.

 

According to Zehnder, the RotoTop offers numerous other advantages: it is easier to dig in all directions, it can be positioned differently and it is more flexible when backfilling because the bucket can be turned. This means you can finish faster and there is significantly less manual labour involved. Werner Zehnder says: "We will continue to equip our excavators with RotoTop. Once you've had it, you never want to do without this flexibility again. Our employees see it that way too."

 

In addition, the recently purchased compactors like all other attachments no longer require rotary motors, which means that additional savings can be made when purchasing attachments. This is another important point, as the company works with milling machines, mixing buckets, compactors,

buckets for liquid soil and many other attachments. And if any damage were to occur to the slewing drive - even due to operating errors - the well-positioned Holp Service would have repaired it very quickly and obligingly.

 

Examples of use in road works and sewer construction

In Rudersberg-Steinenberg, some sewer work has been carried out in recent months. Werner Zehnder reports: "When a sewer is 5 or 6 metres deep, not only the excavation and laying of pipes, but also the subsequent precise backfilling poses a challenge to the excavator's reach. In inner-city areas, we can't work with a 30- or 40-tonne excavator and would therefore quickly reach the end of the range of the mobile excavator used here." This is where it is particularly helpful if the RotoTop makes the buckets rotatable, which means that in practical use you gain one to two metres in reach by rotating the bucket. The excavator with RotoTop proved this again at the beginning of March in Steinenberg when moving and filling a waste water shaft, e.g., because backfilling could be carried out very quickly after the shaft and pipes had been installed.

 

On another road construction site, the mobile excavator was also used with a pendular grab to transport and place kerbstones and material. Thanks to the 8-way rotary joint installed in the RotoTop, a swinging grab with its rotary drive, which must not have a braking effect, can be operated as usual by just moving a switch. Thanks to the largest rotary joints on the market, which are fitted as standard, there is always enough oil supplied to the attachment, so that even long, hard operations with attachments that require a lot of oil, such as a vibratory plate or a rock cutter, can be carried out without any problems.