Features

Lonking widening its product range and developing its hydraulics components operations - Mike Woof reports Shanghai-based Lonking is best known as a major supplier of wheeled loaders, and as one of the market leaders in China. The company has followed a path of diversification in recent years however, significantly widening its product range and with its excavator business in particular proving successful and taking a substantial share of the Chinese home market. Other Lonking products rolling off the produ

The latest equipment from Wirtgen has been used to recycle a stretch of Italy’s busy A4 Autostrada, one of the country’s most important highways. The Wirtgen machine was the first WR250 recycler/reclaimer to be delivered to Italy and was put to work on the A4 Turin-Trieste highway where it proved highly productive. The A4 Autostrada runs 522km from Turin to Trieste via Milan and Venice across northern Italy from west to east. The A4 is divided into five segments, the Turin-Milan, Milan-Brescia, Brescia-Pad

Atlas Copco says that its latest PaveManager control package offers new features including the sophisticated VarioSpeed system, which offers continuous load sensing, reduced fuel costs and automatic measurement and programming tools. The PaveManager 2.0 package is offered on the firm’s new SD pavers and helps optimise and control paving operations, while it is aided by a new ergonomic dashboard with advanced pav¬ing functions. It is available for the recently introduced SD range of pavers and is suited for

Stabiliser/recycling machines are now well proven in road construction applications, giving a stable base layer on which to lay asphalt layers. A wide variety of technologies have been developed to help optimise this process and one proven road stabilisation product called Pavmax that has been used successfully in various markets including Latin America is now being made available worldwide. Introduced by NTI Holdings, Pavmax is a proprietary concentrated liquid, with a multi-enzymatic formulation that

The road business has benefited from fairly constant levels of trading in recent years and even during the downturn, construction operations only fell by a comparatively small quantity during the downturn. Darren Fitch, director for road machinery for the EMEA region within Volvo CE said, “The road construction sector has been far less cyclical than other construction markets.” The global market for road machinery is healthy at present and he said, “We’re having a good year.”

Contractor Nyoni Projects is taking a new approach to two major road upgrades in the North West Province of South Africa. The company is refining its fleet and processes with the use of two new Caterpillarr RM300 reclaimer/recyclers. By introducing these new machines and the associated working methods, the firm believes it can help meet the country’s growing road repair, reclamation and building needs. The firm has seen an increase in productivity since it started using the machines. Maclaud Nyoni, m

Efficient night-time paving operations can reduce construction costs and cut traffic delays - *Todd Mansell writes As roads become more congested, the user cost of daytime lane closures to accommodate road construction and paving has increased dramatically. One solution to lower user costs associated with traffic delays is to carry out more paving at night during off-peak times. However night-time paving brings new challenges to producing quality work in safely.

LiuGong claims to have retained its market leader position as Thailand’s top wheeled loader provider for the third consecutive year. The manufacturing juggernaut for extreme duty equipment entered the Thai market in 2011 and has sold 1,500 wheeled loaders in three years. President of LiuGong Machinery Asia Pacific Mr Chen Hao attributed the success to the brand’s consistent focus in understanding the wheeled loader industry’s needs and delivering products that are innovative, reliable and durable. L

Working in a rainforest area can be challenging, but in a rural area outside of Kuching in East Malaysia, a road construction crew was able to carry out a project successfully One of the biggest challenges came from the moisture levels as the area has an average annual rainfall of 4200mm. The saturated soil complicates the construction process on many levels, including stabilisation and compaction. However this heavy moisture content in the soil is a constant for Geocrete Specialist crews, which handl

A new tunnel connection is helping boost connectivity in Peru, improving access to remote areas Building the tunnel has been an important project as Peru has an imbalance in population distribution with 54.6% of its inhabitants concentrated in the areas along the Pacific Ocean, while only 32% of the population lives in the Andes highlands and 13.4% in the Amazon tropical jungles. The imbalance is acute given that the tropical jungle areas account for 60% of the country’s national territory. Economic deve