Last year Wayne bought his first JCB backhoe loader—going with the 4CX series—from Derek Miller at Cook Equipment Company. He also purchased seven sizes of buckets, a concrete breaker, compactors and augers for the backhoe loader. According to JCB’s website, the company’s founder, Joseph Cyril Bamford, built the first construction duty, mainframe backhoe loader in 1954. The 4CX series of backhoe loaders are 4-wheel drive, 4-wheel steer machines the “surpass the tractive effort of any backhoe loader on the market.”

(Top) Wayne Epley Backhoe grading for concrete with their JCB 4CX. (Bottom) Checking grading.

“Operating the 4-wheel steer took some getting used to,” Wayne says. “It just has gotten easier and easier the more I use it. Initially, not being able to see what the rear tires were doing made operating it tricky, but now I can just feel what it’s doing.”

(Above) Grading for sloped slab. (Below) Wayne Epley Backhoe getting started and putting their JCB 4CX to work.

Wayne has many customers that he has worked with for years. He thinks that is a plus of being an owner/operator because the customers know what to expect from him and he knows what to expect from them. Much of what he does is for concrete tilt-up construction projects. He recently completed a warehouse-type tilt-up building for a customer that was just under a million square feet. That was a big job for him, taking about a month to complete the digging for the foundation. He completes both commercial and industrial projects with block wall footings, foundations, and the trenching for electrical and plumbing.

Most of Wayne’s jobs take anywhere from one day to two weeks to complete. When things get really busy, Wayne knows a couple of other owner/operators that help him out on his jobs. He does the same for them if they need extra help.

“We owner/operators are like brokers sometimes,” Wayne says. “We switch it off with each other to fill in the gaps.”

Throughout his nearly 40 years in business, Wayne has worked pretty steady, rarely having a day off due to no work. Although he likes being on big jobs because it keeps him busy for a time, he likes the change of pace of each project. When customers have out of town jobs, he’ll load his JCB 4CX on the trailer and tow it to the job with his 10-wheel dump truck.

A recent job for Wayne was for a mechanics area/office space addition to an existing truck terminal in Fontana. He spent three days grading for the concrete slab and excavated for 1,000 feet of block walls and the building footings. On a typical project of this size, he is on and off the job about six times as the job progresses, coming on-board when it’s time for him to complete his part.

(Above) Members of the Wayne Epley Backhoe crew. (Below) Making progress on the job site with the help of their JCB 4CX.

Some of the more challenging projects Wayne completes are on hillsides. They are tricky, he says, because of the step footings. On these projects the footings are terraced and each set has to match the set adjacent to it.

He feels that the most challenging aspect of being an owner/operator is the “red tape”: taxes, fees and paperwork. His wife Janis does all the bookkeeping, collecting and banking. “She handles all that and really makes it possible for me to do my job,” Wayne says.

Wayne lives in Norco and completes work all over the Inland Empire, in Riverside, Los Angeles and Orange Counties. Sometimes he travels to San Diego and Northern California if the project arises.

For more information call:
(951) 371-3630. Cc