Site Restrictions & Specification:
Footpaths must remain open as much as possible
Footpaths Varies in size and verge design
All areas are within built-up areas including school routes
Large meterage with time sensitivity
Our first thoughts:
"We as a company have undertaken many footpath resurfacing contracts with multiple methods implemented however this contract has some unique specifications that we thought might be worth discussing"
Methodologies and samples;
The first issue we had to address is that the site was time critical and all the surfacing would have to be done within a tight time frame, this left us with 2. options the cons of both are below
Large force of hand lay teams: (cons) expensive, quality control & material placement.
Asphalt paver: (cons) Material placement & verge (where applicable) protection
With these in mind we believed the only way to guarantee quality control and completion within the time constraints was Option 2. Asphalt paver, this left us with two major issues; material placement & verge (where applicable) protection
The issues ("by trail and error")
Loading,
One of the major problems we needed over come was the material transfer from the asphalt truck to the paver, at first we thought we could get over this by using a skid-steer loader we thought this would be more practical especially when there was a grass verge (the local Concil where very concerned about possibly damage to these verges), However the time delay is safely transporting the material from truck to paver was obvious once we started.
Verge protection
So once the Skid-steer idea wasn't working out we now needed to find a alternate method of transferring the material,
Just for those not in the know we where using a VOGLE SUPER 800 Asphalt paver which is practically capable of holding 3-4ton of material in the front hopper that is however if the hopper can remain fully open which we could no do on most areas due to the widths of the footpaths so the max handling amount was probably around 2ton overall,
so as above we decide to try and utilise the specification of the footpaths themselves to provide us with the "get-around" almost all the footpaths have drop kerbs inlace for the residents
Utilising this we are able to take the maximum amount of material from the truck and with some carful worked out strategies work from one section of drop-kerbs to the next and protect the verge!
General Site Safety
With the footpaths needing to remain open as much as possible and the increased traffic during school pick-ups certain safety procedures had to put in place,
All planed works where planned around times and routes taken to minimise the traffic implications
Pedestrian traffic was taken into account as above but we added site protection equipment.
Additional banksmen where used in order to keep a no go zone around all machinery .
Final thoughts:
we are now nearing completion of these works and have a we believe have a good system in place, we have undertaken many contracts like this one and this one is FAR from being the most complicated however we thought that this is a good representation of how we overcome certain issues that all site normally have, we hope this may be helpful and would like to thank you for reading.
P.S. we would like to thanks our principle contractor for trusting us with this works we hope it has been a hassle free experience,
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