Cut-off Piles Turn Your Salvage Credit Into Zero
You locked sheet pile pricing at bid and bid the same steel a second time as salvage. Then an obstruction forces cut-off, and the residual you counted on stays in the dirt.
A permanent-install trade prices material once and it stays in the building forever. You price the same steel twice, once going in and once on the assumption it comes back out and gets reused on the next job. That second price is a bet on site conditions and other people's specs, buried inside a hard bid you don't get to reopen.
The size of it
You take two margin hits on one line: the buyout escalation, and the salvage that never comes back to the yard. Both of them happen after the price is fixed.
Sheet pile, wide-flange soldier beams, and box steel are the biggest material lines in this scope. Price gets locked at bid and bought at buyout, with steel tariffs at multi-decade highs and escalation language routinely refused on hard-bid public work. That's the first exposure. The second one is harder to see: temporary steel is bid net of a salvage or reuse assumption, so part of the buy is expected back in your yard and priced accordingly. If an obstruction, a spec restriction, or an adjacent structure forces the piles to be cut off and abandoned, that residual disappears and the whole steel buy becomes consumed cost on a number fixed months earlier.
Three moves, in order
Step 04: Estimating system
The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears.
What else costs shoring and shielding contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What shoring and shielding owners ask
How to bid sheet pile when the piles might have to be cut off and left in place?
You locked sheet pile pricing at bid and bid the same steel a second time as salvage. Then an obstruction forces cut-off, and the residual you counted on stays in the dirt.
What does it cost?
You take two margin hits on one line: the buyout escalation, and the salvage that never comes back to the yard. Both of them happen after the price is fixed.
What do I do first?
Split the steel line in the estimate into steel purchased and salvage credit assumed, as two codes, so the credit is visible to you and to whoever reviews the bid.
What are shoring and shielding contractors supposed to be making?
No survey separates shoring and shielding, so there is no figure of its own. The nearest comparable trade in the reference is Excavation, which runs 21% gross margin, 14% overhead and 7% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M, with a CFOS target of 10.5% net. Those are derived figures, not shoring and shielding's own. Read them as the neighbourhood, and read your own job costing as the answer.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 04, estimating system. The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears. It comes from chapter 4 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
Everything on this page is something you can install yourself, andCONTROL is the order to do it in. If you would rather buy the finished result, SPM The Construction CFO does this work for shoring and shielding contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, run by the same author.
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.