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Increasing quality for your customers starts with well-maintained equipment that can function the way it’s meant to

As Eric Swan pointed out in his preventive maintenance article on page xx, performing in any sector of the asphalt industry requires all the moving parts be in sync—right down to a well-oiled engine. If the broom you intended to use behind your cold planer suddenly seizes, you can’t get the fine millings up, thus the tack isn’t going to stick properly, thus the asphalt isn’t going to adhere uniformly. If this takes place on a parking lot job, you might not see an immediate financial hit from an inspector docking dollars from the project, but you might have an angry customer calling you to come back and repair potholes in a couple months.

If the striping equipment arrives at 4 a.m. to prepare the lot for the day’s traffic, but someone didn’t tuck it away correctly last night and you must replace clogged nozzles before you get started, guess whose customer is about to get mad at a delay.

If you allow material to build up on the paver’s tires, the tractor will have a bumpy ride. This means you’re not paving a smooth mat, and you could risk cooled, caked material falling from other areas onto your new mat, resulting in non-compactible areas that turn into potholes later. Photo courtesy of John Ball

What Swan said holds true: paving is a high-stakes performance of people, equipment, traffic, schedules and materials. You need your equipment to be well-maintained. That takes training of invested workers who understand the importance of clean, working machines. John Ball, the proprietor of Top Quality Paving, Manchester, New Hampshire, has preached this gospel for years. When consulting from week to week, he sees asphalt professionals of all skill levels, and he commented on what he sees in the newcomers to the industry.

“These guys out there on the crew aren’t regimented,” Ball said. “There’s a certain procedure for cleaning and maintaining the equipment, but these guys aren’t following a procedure. They’ve got to learn to care. That attitude has to be homegrown. They’ve got to be taught so they know why they’re taking time at the end of the shift to clean the paver.”

Members of this paving crew get to work with putty knives, screwdrivers and release agent to remove built up material from different sensitive areas of the endgate to ensure it can function properly during the day’s shift. Without a smoothly moving endgate, you can’t expect to have a smooth mat. Photo courtesy of John Ball

When the distributor truck driver sprays disappointing strings of tack on the surface to be paved, someone must care enough to speak up. As seen in the image above, the operator didn’t have the right pressure dialed in and had clogged nozzles on the right side of the spray bar. “You can’t have spaghetti strands,” Ball reminded readers. (See the article titled “Prevent Callbacks for Pavement Slippage” for best practices in tack applications.) But someone has to train the operator on this, and the crew—or mechanic—must know how to solve the problem.

The most important machine to check over is the paver.

No matter the size of machine you’re working with—whether that’s a sidewalk paver for a last-minute walking trail, a commercial paver handling a parking lot mill-and-fill or a highway class paver taking care of 1,200 tons on the mainline today—that machine is your lifeblood on the paving project. Its care and maintenance is the difference between achieving a quality job that gets full pay from the customer and a problematic job that gets a costly call-back to fix something later.

This distributor truck driver needs help from the mechanic to get the spray bar leveled and the nozzles cleaned properly. A member of the crew needs to be empowered to call an audible to have this area re-sprayed or the tack isn’t going to do its job. Photo courtesy of John Ball

“The paver is your bread and butter,” Ball said. “If the endgates aren’t flush with the screed, you can’t pave a good joint. If you wrap your tires with asphalt, the tractor’s ride is going to be bumpy and the screed, which is your hot iron, won’t be able to smooth it out. Good cleaning and routine maintenance of the paver will make or break you.”

Due to the importance of this topic for a contractor’s pay, we’ll return to it soon. Use the tips offered with these pictures to guide your cleaning and maintenance routine and watch for upcoming articles on this topic from Ball.