Highway Star

Contractors and site supervisors can become accustomed to overseeing large projects, but sometimes the scale of a job can go beyond the horizon.

“In the past, with recycle jobs, we would typically break, haul, crush and truck before we put the material back down,” says Jason Marmann, equipment manager for CJ Moyna & Sons Inc., based in Elkader, Iowa. Moyna’s recycling-related projects in the past had been county and state road projects. “Crushing along a 10-mile stretch of interstate—this was a first for us,” he says.

Marmann is referring to 10 miles of northbound I-35 in south central Iowa. The highway was concrete with asphalt overlay, and Moyna had won the bid to pull up the old pavement, handle the grading, crush the asphalt and concrete and place the material back on site for use as sub-base and granular sub-base prior to repaving.
Marmann and colleagues, along with newly purchased track-mounted crushing and screening equipment, helped CJ Moyna & Sons tackle the job efficiently.

ADDING MOBILITY
Although Moyna was founded in 1947 as a grading contractor, the company has grown to include mining and processing of stone, sand and gravel and concrete and asphalt recycling among its services.

Today it has about 220 employees and a second office in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “We’ve handled aggregate and recycle processing since 2000,” says Marmann. “We have a pretty large fleet of portable and tracked equipment that we use for recycle jobs, in our smaller pits and for added production.”

What that fleet lacked heading into the I-35 project was mobility. “When we won this I-35 project, we knew we needed to find tracked equipment with the production capacity that would allow us to crush all of the material on site.”
The ability to crush recycled asphalt and concrete on site is not only a cost-saver to the contractor (trucking material is arguably the highest cost incurred in a such a project, even if the material is re-used), but it also is environmentally friendly and boosts safety because fewer trucks are on the road during the project.

WALK THE LINE
Moyna determined that for the I-35 grading and recycling job the best solution would be to employ tracked plants that could follow the grade and move under their own power.

Marmann says Moyna wanted a tracked processing system that would allow the company to crush, screen and windrow material as it simultaneously walked the grade along the highway—“crushing on the run,” so to speak.

“We had another project going on at the same time as the I-35 project—a runway project for the Cedar Rapids airport—so we needed mobile equipment that would give us good production, too,” says Marmann. “We knew we would have to pull it off of I-35 in the middle of the job and use it at the airport before taking it back to I-35,” he continues. “So the two projects justified the equipment purchase. And the only manufacturer we found with equipment that could process material on the go and meet our production goals was KPI-JCI.”

For various projects, Marmann had worked closely with KPI-JCI factory personnel in Yankton, S.D., and Eugene, Ore. Marmann also was familiar with local KPI-JCI dealer Road Machinery & Supplies Co. (RMS) from prior equipment purchases.

“We had made factory visits in 2008 and 2009,” he says. “They were very hands-on and very open with the lines of communication. They listened and they have adjusted and tailored their products to fit the market.”
Marmann says this willingness to work with CJ Moyna & Sons also played into the company’s equipment choice. Moyna ordered the tracked machines (a KPI-JCI FT5260 horizontal shaft impact, or HIS, crushing plant and a KPI-JCI FT6203 6-feet by 20-feet three-deck horizontal screen plant) in late 2009, and they were delivered to the I-35 site near Osceola, Iowa, in April  of 2010.

CJ Moyna & Sons’ role included pulling up the concrete with its asphalt overlay on a 10-mile stretch along the northbound lanes. The milled asphalt was stockpiled along the outside shoulder.

Moyna broke the concrete with an excavator and left it piled along the median shoulder. The asphalt-treated base under the concrete was then chunked and laid on top of the asphalt overlay millings. As the company graded the road site, it crushed the asphalt with a KPI-JCI FT4240 closed-circuit HSI plant and put that material down on the graded road site as sub-base.
The FT5260 and FT6203 plants processed the concrete material, fed at 6-inch minus, crushing and screening it to 1.5 inches for use as granular sub-base. Marmann says the material provides excellent drainage for stormwater control.
The paving contractor for the job came in behind Moyna, adding asphalt-treated base followed by concrete pavement slabs. Moyna’s role in the project wrapped up in August of 2010.

SET UP AND GO
This project was Moyna’s first interstate highway recycling job, and it was KPI-JCI’s first setup with an FT5260 and FT6203 crushing and screening as the plants walked the grade. “For [it being] a first time for both sides, it went really well,” says Marmann.

He adds, “This setup is so versatile and usable, at one point when we needed material really quickly in one of our pits we pulled the plants off of the I-35 job, unloaded at the pit, put the plants together and started crushing, just like that,” he says.
At the I-35 site, the CJ Moyna & Sons crew soon developed a process and a pattern. “There’s 3 inches of milled asphalt off the top of the concrete put onto the shoulder, creating a windrow for us,” says crew member Dustin Ryan. “We walked down the line and crushed to 1.5-inch sub-base; we averaged about 1,600 feet per day in an eight-hour period. We were moving almost every 20 seconds, depending on the size of the material. Larger material may take us 40 seconds for each move forward.”

From the start, the tracked crusher and screen proved their worth under tight deadlines and unpredictable weather conditions, including heavy rain.

In spite of heavy rain (more than 55 inches from May 1 to mid-July 2010) throughout southeast Iowa and diverting the new KPI-JCI plants for other applications, CJ Moyna completed its I-35 project on time and within budget.

“We had good equipment and some fortunate weather breaks,” Marmann says. “The material itself also provided some breaks—we had good luck with our material. Plus, personnel stepped up to meet the challenge. But, if the equipment hadn’t performed for us, it would have been hard for us to make up for that lost time.” C&DR

This article was contributed by KPI-JCI, Yankton, S.D. More information on the company can be found online at www.kpijci.com.