James McRay, Marketing & Media Manager
Efficiency Production, Inc.

Muskegon Community College (MCC) recently began work renovating several building on their Western Michigan campus.  One challenging renovation was the addition of a new elevator in the Student Union Learning Center.  The new elevator was a challenge because the elevator shaft needed to be built in the corner of two exterior walls accessing three underground floors.  A 28 foot deep excavation was required to pour-in-place the new concrete shaft.

Excavating within the corner of two existing walls is an exceedingly challenging operation, much less shoring the excavation 28 feet deep for an extended period time.  Taking on the daunting task was McCormick Sand, Inc. of Muskegon, Michigan.

Finding a Shoring Solution
Whatever shoring McCormick chose, it needed to be installed directly along the two perpendicular exterior walls where the elevator shaft was to be built.  This severely limited the choices of shoring or shielding that was feasible.  Joel McCormick, President of McCormick Sand, had some experience with a slide rail shoring system, and thought that it might be a solution for the difficult excavation project.

"I've worked with Efficiency Production in the past for other shoring items, so I gave them a call first to talk about maybe using slide rail on this project," said McCormick.  "I talked with Greg (Ross, Efficiency's Slide Rail Manager) for a short time, and he was sure Slide Rail would work.  He came out to the site to take some preliminary photos, and soon we had a plan."

"Dig and Push" system fits in tight spots
Efficiency's Universal Slide Rail is a component shoring system comprised of steel panels (similar to trench shield sidewalls) and vertical steel posts.  The versatile system can be used in a variety of configurations, such as small four-sided pits; large unobstructed working pits as big as 50 x 50 feet with Efficiency's ClearSpan System; or in a linear Multi-Bay configuration to install length of pipe over 40 feet.