Better Roads

September 2013

Better Roads Digital Magazine

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HighwayContractor By Daniel C. Brown, Contributing Editor AMERICAN CONCRETE PAVEMENT ASSOCIATION Breaking the Mold High-production paving on 4-inch overlay I t took an Illinois contractor eight days of elapsed time to pave a 4-inch concrete overlay on 4 1/2 miles of Illinois 53, a four-lane divided roadway. D Construction, an American Concrete Pavement Association (ACPA) member, placed approximately 125,350 square yards of the concrete overlay this past year on a composite pavement of asphalt over concrete. "We milled off all of the asphalt in some areas, so in those areas, we were pouring over the old Route 66 concrete," says Lester Cheney, concrete superintendent for D Construction, Coal City, Illinois. "But we mainly paved over asphalt. "This was a bonded overlay," Cheney says. "We had no bond breaker. We cleaned it thoroughly. We had sweepers and laborers with blowpipes hooked to a compressor. We would start early in the morning the day of a pour and let the laborers get a few hundred feet ahead of us. Every day, we were cleaning." The contractor paved the two northbound lanes in late May 14 and the two southbound lanes in August. "We were right around 2,000 cubic yards per day," Cheney says. A number of factors contributed to the rapid execution of paving for the $3.4 million project, according to Randell Riley, P.E., executive director/engineer for the Illinois Chapter, ACPA. Riley assisted the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) with the design of the 4-inch concrete overlay, which was sawcut into 4-by-4-foot panels. Because this was an overlay project, the concrete contained no steel. The contractor added 4 pounds per cubic yard of Grace Construction Products Strux 90/40 synthetic structural fibers and paved 25 feet wide. D Construction's crews could pick up concrete in end dumps at a central mix plant and discharge directly in front of the paver. There were no dowel baskets to pin to the grade. D Construction used a GOMACO GHP 2800 paver with Leica Geosystems' PaveSmart 3D stringless control system. Stringless September 2013 Better Roads HighwayCon_Illinois_BR0913.indd 14 8/29/13 1:06 PM

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