Asphalt milling, paving & compaction

Italian paving contractor VARESCO has made good use of its new AP500E paver from Caterpillar Paving on two difficult jobsites. One was a confined site with an abundance of manholes. The other one featured a road with a slope so steep the transport truck trailers were covered to prevent material from spilling out the back. The confined site required paving of an access road leading to a residential area in Merano, a town of 38,000 in northern Italy.

UK company Bituchem hopes to capitalise on the growing need for road repairs with its proven FortSeal product. Developed in the US, it is said to offer an inexpensive method for repairing and sealing road surfaces. The fast-setting emulsion system can be used to cover small cracks and surface voids, as well as reducing surface brittleness and tackling ravelling.

Construction equipment manufacturer BOMAG will have a special focus on milling machines and finishers, and will feature two product premieres: the new BOMAG BF 800 finisher (world premiere) and the sales launch of the BM 500/15 compact planer, plus milling drums for third party cold milling machines in the 500mm class.

Asphalt testing is performed for a variety of reasons by a variety of companies. Patrick Smith reports Road safety is in the interest of everyone and today it is also an important target shared by the majority of the companies involved in road design and construction. The growing attention paid to this value has had a remarkable effect on the material testing field, encouraged by an increasing market demand for testing solutions as well as by the new technical requirements established by international st

Roads in south-eastern France and those on the west coast of Spain share a common challenge often faced by road construction crews around Europe: extremely tight working conditions. According to Caterpillar, such conditions create construction demands that can affect traffic flow, the preservation of historic structures and even the ability to resurface these narrow roads that, in some cases, have been around for centuries. Add to these challenging working conditions, the mountainous terrain found in the Al

New generation wheeled pavers aimed at use in territories such as the UK, Italy, South Africa and Southern Germany are now coming to market. Pavers in these countries are often expected to be driven from one part of a site to another or for short distances, which is why the additional mobility of the wheeled machine is preferred in many instances over similarly-sized tracked models. This preference for wheeled units comes in spite of the greater stability offered by tracked machines. BOMAG, Caterpillar and

Italian firm Massenza is boosting its range of road repair machines with the introduction of an innovative unit that combines the functions of an emulsion sprayer and chippings spreader. According to Diego Massenza, "We have made a prototype and it has been running now for two years." The machine can be used to spread chippings and then immediately after, spray emulsions or polymer-modified bitumen (PMB). Massenza explained that the firm is expanding its range of road repair machines as it sees a particular

Sophisticated dual layer paving technologies currently on the market are said to offer major advantages to road builders. Roads built using twin layer, hot on hot paving techniques can last considerably longer than those constructed using conventional methods. Contractors and clients also stand to gain from savings on materials costs, through the elimination of the need for emulsion spraying between binder and wearing courses and with the use of thin layer wearing course designs. At present two paver man

The efficiency of asphalt compaction performance has improved immeasurably in recent years with the development of more effective equipment. Manufacturers have honed the designs of the machines, making them easier and more comfortable to operate, improving visibility and also tackling issues such as maintenance downtime by making the equipment more reliable and quicker to service. However one of the biggest advances in compaction performance has come not from the machines, but from the control and measur