Lasers guide Target construction project

BANGOR – Shoppers will have to wait until spring to visit the new Target store taking shape on Stillwater Avenue, but construction site junkies can already find plenty to interest them.

The main event at the site Friday morning was the pouring of nearly 500 cubic yards of concrete, enough to cover just about a quarter of the 125,000- square-foot floor space. A dozen cement mixing trucks from Vaughn Thibodeau and Sons were kept busy ferrying loads to the site. The trucks, with white barrels rotating slowly, idled outside the closed-in space, waiting to back in and unload.

The star of the show was inside – a laser-guided screed. Screeds are used to settle, level and smooth wet concrete. Traditional manual methods have long since given way to automated machinery, but the laser technology is relatively new.

“New to Maine” anyway, as Frank “Sparky” Clement put it. Clement is the owner of Clement Masonry Inc. in Orono and the flatwork contractor for the Target job. Clement said the technology has been available since the late 1980s but has only recently been in use in Maine. Big box stores like Target increasingly specify the use of a laser screed to produce the perfect surface they need, he said.

The screed is mounted on a long hydraulic arm that extends several feet from a blocky, diesel-powered vehicle. Receivers attached to the blade of the screed pick up signals from a sending unit on a post in the center of the floor space.

The laser equipment automatically adjusts the leveling function to produce a perfectly flat and level surface.

Clement owns a smaller model, but the spiffy new unit in use on Friday was owned and operated by Brian Phinney of Gray.

By late afternoon, Clement said, three riding trowel machines would be at work finishing the surface, shaking the grainy particles down and leaving just the “cream” on top. By Saturday morning, he said, looking out over the floor, “this will all look just like glass.”

The department store is expected to open in March 2004.