Equipment World Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/662812
EquipmentWorld.com | April 2016 51 an infrared heater allows you to smooth out an area like that, without having to cut and replace the asphalt. Infrared heaters have become an important part of what we do." Milling machinery You can argue that milling ma- chines shouldn't be labeled as ancil- lary, but the way they can multitask allows them to be included in this category. As Covington mentioned previously, he uses his milling machine to check the grade on his paving work. "We'll use our milling machine to make sure we've got our cross slope right, even if we've got some joints that are kind of rough due to stopping and starting in different lo- cations within the job," he explains. "We'll just run it over the surface to make sure we've got our cross slope, and honestly, to make sure we don't have a lot of bumps." Covington also uses it as a recycler. In his area, most of the municipalities or highway depart- ments don't view milled material as something worth saving. "At a job we're working on now, we milled 8 inches of asphalt off that the municipality was just con- sidering excavation work," he says. "That's huge. It's a resource we're using. We might use some of the RAP as a temporary driveway." Portable power Road smoothness aside, every job- site needs a quality source of power. Probably the most ancillary of all equipment for paving, are portable power solutions. Jeremy Bailey, air products man- ager-Americas for Doosan Portable Power in Statesville, North Carolina, is seeing more tools involved in smaller aspects of paving (such as cutting) becoming electric. These, in particular, have three-phase motors. "For a lot of those types of ap- plications, our generators have three-phase power and single-phase power on board, so you can run the larger three-phase motors," he says. "For example, if you're cut- ting expansion joints, a lot of those saws are electric. Or, large diamond rope cutting saws used to cut a large bridge in half or cut a couple of pylons – a lot of those items are electric now and require three- phase power." The benefit of three-phase motors is increased efficiency and less amp draw compared to single-phase motors. "So as more tools go elec- tric, more generation is needed on site, including three-phase power," Bailey says. "All of our gen sets have a voltage selector switch on the back that controls whether you have a single phase, like 208 or 230 voltage, or three phase 480 voltage, which is most common with some of these large three-phase motors. So, you can run an array of dif- ferent tools on a jobsite with one generator."