Prior to the development of Road Planing, existing road pavements would be
mechanically broken and removed using hand breakers and excavators, although
during this period road maintenance was only in its infancy as major roads had
only been in existence since the 1960’s.
Road planing began as a technology in the early 1970’s with the development of
the first hot milling or heater planer machines introduced in 1970.
The heater planers heated the asphalt surface using gas burners emitting huge
plumes of smoke from the burning asphalt (and in some cases tar). The resultant
surface was then removed by scraping the hot asphalt off with a tractor bucket
to receive the new asphalt layers.
The process was dangerous, and a health, safety and environmental nightmare so
the industry quickly investigated a viable alternative and came up with the cold
milling process that is familiar to us today. |
 |
|
In the UK the first introduction to this process was when Wirtgen (Gmbh) set up
it’s own Planing Contracting Division in 1973 as Wirtgen (GB). The business
utilised the hot milling technology and was established in Lincoln. The company
soon decided that they would concentrate their efforts on the manufacture of
equipment and sold the contracting business to Colas in 1978.
The technological leap to cold planing was developed in 1979 with both Wirtgen
developing a machine and CMI bringing a machine from the USA.
The new planing machines were revolutionary in their approach to pavement
removal with speed, accuracy and versatility being the main attributes. The new
cold milling machines also had an advantage over the old heaters in that they
could also mill to greater depths (150mm) in one cut; today the modern machines
can cut to 300mm.
As technology moved on it would not be out of the ordinary for complete sections
of carriageway (4000 – 5000 tonnes) being removed overnight with several
planers, to allow pavements to be ready for resurfacing the following day.
|
Further developments were then made in material removal with conveyor systems
both front and rear mounted introduced to ensure efficient extraction of the
planed material into a waiting lorry, which negated double handling of the
material.
Major players in planing contracting soon emerged and very soon there were in
excess of 20 companies in business throughout the 1980’s. Currently it is
estimated that some sixty companies have planing machines of varying sizes from
the small 350mm drum width to the large 2.2m machines. |
|