The last thing you want is to get to the end of the round robin of trucks and discover, oh no, we still have half a lane to pull to finish the parking lot. If it’s 4 p.m. and the plant’s already cleaned out, you know someone’s getting in trouble for asking the plant operator to fire back up and send another load to the job you didn’t manage correctly.
Let’s take a look at how to notice if something’s going wrong earlier in the day. Let’s look at how to figure yield to monitor your progress.
Start with the constants you know—width, depth and tons.
- Let’s say you’re paving 10 feet wide today.
- Let’s say the lift you’re placing is 1 inch (about ¾-inch compacted).
- Let’s say each truck arriving holds 18 tons of homogenous HMA.
You want to figure how much each truck will pave (how far the material will “go”) so you can monitor your progress. Take the number of tons and divide by 0.0567 (1 inch) to get the square yards the material will pave. Multiply that number by 9 (to get square feet) and divide that by your 10 feet of paving width. This gives you the linear feet the material will pave.
In our example with the constants listed above, here’s what we get:
18 ÷ 0.0567 × 9 ÷ 10 = 285 linear feet
If your first pull doesn’t make it all the way to 285 linear feet, this means you’re paving more than 1 inch thickness. You may have birdbaths in the surface or poor quality in the milling that’s causing you to fill in as you go.
While your paving crew can’t help what was done to the surface before your arrival, you can monitor how it’s affecting your progress during the day. You can call the back office to let them know there’s a problem. You can call the plant to let the operator know if you’ll need an extra truck near the end of the shift. Planning ahead could save the costs of standing around waiting on the plant to restart and send another truck at dusk when you’ll also require lighting and possibly a rescheduling of the striping crew.
Figuring and monitoring yield affects more than the pull in front of you. It can affect the outcome of the day. The more members of the crew who understand its importance and how to do it, the better.
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