Under the gun

Cabela's team beats deadline for massive store

By Jennifer Pfaff

Richfield should be expecting visitors.

The community just welcomed a Cabela's hunting, camping and outdoor outfitting operation that is expected to draw about 3 million customers a year.

There's plenty to make the store a destination. It features a 40,000-gallon freshwater, walk-through aquarium packed with Wisconsin fish; a mountain covered with hundreds of animals and two naturally flowing waterfalls; a 25,000-square-foot wildlife museum; and an African diorama.

But getting the business up and running meant overcoming some serious challenges that included a tight, four-month time frame, said Scott Puhlmacher, project manager with Town and Country Electric, the project's electrical subcontractor. Typically he said, it takes seven to eight months to finish a Cabela's from the point when subs arrive on site.

"We were literally out there for just under five months," he said.

General contractor Kraus-Anderson Construction Co. coordinated all the subcontractors -some days saw 400 or so people working on site at one time - to make sure everything proceeded quickly and smoothly.

	Project Name: Cabela's Location: Richfield Submitting Companies: Kraus-Anderson Construction Co., Madison; Town & Country Electric, a Faith Technologies Inc. brand, Wauwatosa General Contractor: Kraus-Anderson Construction Co. Project Leaders: Dale Bittner, Town & Country's general foreman; Pat Mulcahey, Kraus-Anderson's project manager; Scott G. Pulvermacher, Town & Country's project manager; Tom Roepke, Kraus-Anderson's director of operations Architect: Crabtree, Rohrbaugh & Associates Architects, Mechanicsburg, Pa. Engineers: Barton Associates Inc., York, Pa., mechanical, electrical engineer; CenterPoint Engineering Inc., Mechanicsburg, Pa., structural engineer; National Survey & Engineering, a division of R.A. Smith & Associates Inc., Brookfield, civil engineer Owner: Cabela's Retail Inc., Sidney, Neb. Project Costs: $28.04 million overall; $2.6 million for electrical Project Size: 165,000 square feet Start Dates: January 2006 construction start; April 2006 electrical start Completion Dates: August 2006 construction finish; September 2006 electrical finish

"It ended up being a good mix of applying past experience and knowing what has worked in other situations," said Tom Roepke, director of operations for Kraus-Anderson, which served as contractor on several Cabela's stores. "It helps in the juggling of finishing one part of the structure while building another."

The Town and Country crew definitely saw the need to work efficiently with other subcontractors. Faced with 26,000 hours of electrical work and the need to accommodate the roofing and concrete contractors, the company used computer-assisted designs to map out its lighting plan. The map eased the work of the field crew, which had color CAD measurements from roof peaks, column lines and roof edges to work from.

"Those 108 high bay lights all hang from a 4-inch box up in that ceiling," Pulvermacher said. "Track lighting hangs from support pendants. When you are up there walking around on hundreds of thousands of square feet of roof, well, you have to find that."

Managing the concrete pours was another time-sensitive matter. Kraus-Anderson divided the building into six sections, establishing a pour sequence. The pour dates were absolute, so Town and Country had little choice but to stay ahead of the game. The subcontractor had more than 3,000 feet of under-floor duct, 300 single floor boxes and about 50,000 feet of PVC conduit to install before the concrete was laid.

"Sometimes the grading would finish in the afternoon or evening, and Kraus-Anderson would want the pouring done the next morning," Pulvermacher said. "We had to work together make sure we had time to finish it."