Wirtgen’s rapid road rehab

April 30, 2024 30 seconds Read
By David Arminas
The Mill Assist and Automatic Functions Wirtgen’s W 210 Fi large milling machine make for quick work in the hills of Sicily

It’s a picturesque Sicilian landscape of small roads stretching up and down hills and around tight curves. But when these small roads need big renovations, it takes a large machine to do it fast and efficiently. This is why a contractor chose the W 210 Fi large milling machine which can mill up the entire roadway in two-to-three passes.

The lengths of the individual sections of the rehabilitation project varied between 50-500m. For rehabilitation of this kind, the milling machine is repositioned several times a day and moves from one section to the next partly under its own power. The clear advantage of the new F-Series technology is that it delivers the desired milling pattern with the first cut, even on short sections.

“I’ve been working with Wirtgen equipment for a long time, including milling machines of this size,” said says Roberto Prainito, owner of the contracting company Sicilstrade. “I’m really impressed by the new features of the F-Series.”

The Mill Assist system monitors milling quality and delivers a perfectly consistent surface right from the start, whether it’s 25mm or 500m to a depth of 50mm. This lets the driver focus entirely on the loading process and on keeping the cut in line. The individual sections could therefore be milled off in record time, enabling the completion of several sections per day.

The combination of its outstanding maneuverability and high capacity and flexibility for material offloading made the machine the ideal choice for the project on Sicily’s winding roads. An experienced paving team from Sicilstrade was always on site, ready to fill in each new patch directly behind the machine.

Out with the old asphalt and in with the new—in only a couple of hours and without any serious disruption of traffic. “We are working on only small patches here and the machine does a superb job,” said Prainito.

A whole range of automated functions, like positioning in a second cut or automatic tracking of the discharge conveyor, considerably sped up the process and improved the results produced on the construction site. In addition, the ability to save and store milling depths and the auto-start feature in combination with Mill Assist made milling work on these differently-sized patches especially easy. 

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