The Right Solution

After beginning his career in C&D, Tim Lipsmeyer and a partner bought a small mobile recycling plant in 1997 to produce recycled asphalt and concrete. Southern Crushing, a Mississippi-based operation, now produces ½-inch-minus recycled asphalt pavement (RAP) used for road projects in Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas.

Depending on the volume of fines in the material being screened, the plant can produce upwards of 140 tons per hour. However, it had been experiencing blinding and pegging of its ½-inch steel woven wire due to the sticky nature of the recycled asphalt. Many days, Lipsmeyer was being forced to shut down for 30 minutes every two hours to clean the screen media that was blinding up to six inches deep. Each day, losing two hours of production time was costing the operation over 200 tons of potentially sellable material. So, Lipsmeyer turned to the Flex-Mat® 3 Tensioned screen cloth from Major Wire Industries Limited, Candiac, Quebec, Canada, to eliminate the blinding problem and increase his potential monthly sellable product by at least 4,000 tons.

“We had been offered a job in northeast Arkansas requiring that we screen asphalt in the winter, which is a nightmare because the wet asphalt sticks so badly,” states Lipsmeyer, owner of Southern Crushing. “I had seen advertisements for Flex-Mat 3, so I decided to give it a chance. In spite of my skepticism, Flex-Mat 3 was the first product that did what it said it would.”

Southern Crushing employs a portable Eagle 500-05 crusher and two 4-foot by 14-foot double-deck Cedarapids tensioned screen boxes. In-spec material is screened through by the bottom decks and the oversized product is re-circulated back through the crusher. Previously, when there was precipitation of any kind, the screen media would blind and the operation couldn’t run. So, Lipsmeyer first tried stainless steel slotted screen media on the bottom deck of one screen to eliminate the problem. But it caused another problem, allowing oversized product to fall through, resulting in out-of-spec product stockpiles. He was forced to switch back to square woven wire and deal with the blinding or use 3/16-inch wire openings.

Major Wire’s Flex-Mat 3 High-Performance, Self-Cleaning Screen Media provided a better solution, says Lipsmeyer. Available for flat-surface and tensioned screen decks, it allows producers to increase screen open area, create more screening action with the vibrating wires and eliminate blinding and pegging problems to achieve more throughput of spec material. Its distinctive lime-green polyurethane strips bond individual wires, and allow them to vibrate independently at different frequencies. With more screening action, more properly sized material falls through instead of sticking to the wire.

“Now, we use Flex-Mat 3 Tensioned panels on the bottom deck of one screen with a ½-inch opening,” Lipsmeyer says. “We are able to produce spec RAP and clean out fines from crushed concrete no matter how wet it is. We can even screen in a complete downpour.”

Since purchasing Flex-Mat 3 from Major Wire, Southern Crushing says it has screened more than 40,000 tons over the original panels—which are still operational and being used today. The operation even ran through winter, only stopping when the snow fall got so heavy that it compromised the belts and froze up the screen box.

When asked about the future relationship between Southern Crushing and Major Wire, Lipsmeyer replied, “I very seldom buy anything that works like it says it will. With this kind of success, Flex-Mat 3 will definitely be a part of Southern Crushing’s future.”