Highway Contractor - Paving as Art: a job story
HighwayContractor
By Daniel C. Brown, Contributing Editor
Manatts ran this paver at about 28 feet
per minute, which helped produce a
smooth ride on the pavement.
Getting
smoothness
and density
just right
A
n Iowa-based contractor has won 80 percent
of the available bonus payments on a successful
18-mile, two-lane asphalt paving project near
Grinnell, Iowa.
The Iowa Department of Transportation awarded Manatts Inc., Newton, a total of approximately
$300,000 in incentives for smoothness and density on
the State Highway146 project. Preliminary construction
on the project began last March and was substantially
complete in September. The existing roadway was a
deteriorated, full-depth asphalt pavement that averaged
11.5 inches thick. The first step in rehabilitating the
pavement was cold-in-place recycling (CIR) to a depth
of 4 inches, says Jeff Steinkamp, project manager for
Manatts. The recycling process, by WK Construction,
a subcontractor from Middleton, Wis., consisted of
milling and rejuvenating the pavement, then laying the
material back down in a windrow. Using a windrow
pickup machine and asphalt paver, the subcontractor
completed the cold recycling.
Manatts’ paving work began with widening the
24-foot-wide cold-recycled roadway. With a Wirtgen
milling machine working 2 feet wide, the contractor
cut a 6-inch-deep trench on each side of the pavement.
Next, Manatts followed up with a Weiler Widener W-30
to place two lifts of asphalt into the trench and widen
the road to 28 feet. The widening required 12,400 tons
of hot-mix asphalt. When that was compacted, the road
was ready for the 3-inch overlay.
To place the first 1.5-inch intermediate lift, Manatts
ran a Roadtec RP-195 tracked asphalt paver at a speed
of about 28 feet per minute. Running the paver at this
Better Roads November 2012 5