With labor shortages, high interest rates and limited roadwork seasons in some areas, it’s critical to have affordable equipment that can increase productivity with crew numbers of any size. This is also why it’s so crucial that we, as an equipment manufacturer, offer affordable, efficiency-enhancing machinery, such as our FH-R material placement attachment, which checks these boxes for roadwork crews. Its ability to connect with various pieces of common equipment, minimal labor and maintenance requirements and ability to increase efficiency placing topsoil, gravel, asphalt, limestone and more make it a popular and valuable tool.
But just how much can the FH-R increase efficiency for road shouldering projects? We constantly collect feedback from our customers to find out these answers, better understand the scope of their work and understand how the FH-R helps them. Below, we run through two real-world examples of our customers using the FH-R to great success.
Muscatine County Highway Department, Iowa
The Muscatine County Highway Department in Iowa maintains about 600 miles of road during construction season. Road foreman Kyle Soukup and his six-man road maintenance crew traditionally complete shoulder work the old-fashioned way — with plenty of labor and elbow grease — by using less-than-precise side-discharge trucks to unload rock and a grader to push the material to the shoulder. The inefficiency of this method became abundantly clear to Muscatine County Highway Department as they scrambled to complete miles of roadwork among unpredictable summer weather and an impending season end.
After a few seasons, the county decided it was time to find a more efficient method. The county purchased an FH-R in 2018 and saw immediate benefits. With the new method, the crew completed 8 lane miles of road using the FH-R to place Class A rock, or 3/4-inch road stone with fines. The work was completed in a single pass, cutting out the additional steps required with the previous grader process. The new method also improved accuracy, eliminating any cleanup for loose rock on the roadway. The FH-R took what was once a two- or three-day process down to only about one day. At a minimum, it provided the Muscatine County Highway Department with a 200% increase in efficiency, making a 100% ROI achievable within four years.
The highway department tackled a similar project with the FH-R in the fall of 2022, putting down 4 miles of new 2-inch shoulder in just over two hours. The FH-R continues to improve efficiency and transform the miles of roadway they can repair in a season. In the spring of 2023, Muscatine County completed 15 miles of shouldering in just two weeks — a project that would have easily taken more than six weeks with their previous approach.
Read the full story on Informed Infrastructure.
Commerce City, Colorado
Colorado Public Works Journal talked with Commerce City for a case study published in the Spring-Summer issue of 2018. From the article:
Commerce City in Colorado tackles about one or two months of road shouldering a year. They had been renting an FH-R for this span of work, but after a couple years of doing so, decided to purchase an FH-R as a money-saving tactic.
Previously, the city had completed 1 mile of road shouldering a day using a motor grader with six to seven crew members. The crew quickly doubled its efficiency, and with a smaller crew. With the FH-R, Commerce City shouldered 2 miles a day with a crew of four.
“The amount of time that we use the Road Widener, it could pay for itself within a month,” Commerce City pavement operations foreman Lucas Bustos told Colorado Public Works Journal. “It can also be used with hot mix as well as recycled asphalt.”
Check out the full case study in Colorado Public Works.
Experience new levels of productivity
Time and labor to complete road shouldering jobs can all come at a premium. Having options like the FH-R material placement attachment to drive up efficiency for crews of any size in a cost-effective manner can be a game changer for your roadwork operation.
Learn more about the FH-R or request a demo with us to see it in action.
