Ho Ho Ho

It looks like business has been very good for you this year! Congrats!!

There goes your holiday! Lots o'learning involved?

C'mon Roadie, you have to post all the friggin' chargers and cables that go with your baggage. I won't even bring up batteries. Not to mention a snap shot of the truck you haul it all around in (I'm thinking Limo or U-Hall)

Plus I want a ticket for your time machine so you can use all those gizmo's at once, or at least watch you try.

:woot: Luck you! I can't quit drooling.:good:

I'd be like the dog that finally caught the car it had been chasing. I wouldn't know what to do with it once I got it.

Trying to remember who once mentioned : "If you're going to buy Trimble products, buy them in threes" 😛

Got a similar pile of yellow boxes about a month ago. Robots for machine control I assume? What are you controlling with them?

Why do you need 4 power kits for three S6s?

There are only 2 power kits. The other two are controller kits. 2 controllers, 2 rovers ,a base,and 3 guns. Yes always buy in threes 😉 . This is just the gear for the field crews. After the first I'm going to have 5 more rovers and collectors coming for the grade checkers and discipline engineers. Feb 1 we will start gearing up the machines, 3 conventional dozers, 1 high speed dozer. We are getting two blades and each will have both gps and uts capability. I have my guys convinced on the pcs900 for the paver but am getting push back from our jv partners on that. It's probably a year before they start thinking paving so I guess we can cross that bridge when we get closer.

Not to much of a learning curve on the equipment, but I've never ran my network off of the internet before, or messed with tcc much, so that might be painful at first. We equipped everything with the radios just incase something goes down. Inventory, assigning , and verifying firmware through the holidays then it's off to the races jan5.

Ho Ho Ho de' door

>... but I've never ran my network off of the internet before, or messed with tcc much, so that might be painful at first.

You da' Man El Roadie. Let me know how that all works out. I'm facing a very parallel universe in hooking up to new fangled techno crappola that I was better off not learning in the first place. Back then the world was flat.... oh heck

That was then and this is now. Best of luck with your endeavors. I've got a post forthcoming regarding those yellow box equipment suppliers, but always love the challenge.

Cheers and best of to your 'Boys (kinda glad they made it convincingly), and even your Stars
wrg

New gear - Always nice to see. That's what I like about these large heavy/civil projects, there's money for gear for the project + they aren't afraid to buy top of the line. Enjoy!

And if work isn't done right, ho-ho-ho-hold the payment! 😛

We've been running the 3d paving system for a month or so with good results so far.

> We've been running the 3d paving system for a month or so with good results so far.

Is it 30% better? They say that on just about everything they sell, but only have speculative data. I would be interested to hear some feedback on it from an actual user. Particularly how the yield improved, how your paving crew adapted to the technology, and how many people are needed to manage the set-ups to keep the spread moving. Everything that I sat in on at Dimensions was either a salesman or product development guy who either sensationalize its capabilities or underplay the disadvantages.

Not sure how to quantify 30% better. We weren't looking for increased production as much as a better finished product.

We've been using it for practice on a stretch of road where we are widening an existing 2 lane to 4 lanes with a suicide lane crowned in the middle, with all the new construction on one side of the existing road. So we used GPS for the earthwork, graded the rock with a a grader with UTS, and have laid 3 courses of base asphalt on the rock. So theoretically it would have been fine on this side just to lay the proper thicknesses. However, the other side will be several courses of overlay on the existing road with a lot of variability in thickness. That's always the hardest situation to do a good job on. That's where we should really be able to see some improvement in the finished product.

The main paving crew is a bunch of older guys that are resistant to even running the electronics on the paver, so we chose a younger crew to use it. They saw the opportunity to step over the other crew and really put a lot of effort in learning it. We designated one guy off the crew to learn how to set up the instruments, but the paving foreman and distributor driver also learned how to do it. One of the screw guys now does the checking while the others are tied up. I pretty much stayed with them the first week just to make sure they knew what to watch for, but now they take care of it themselves. We bought 3 robots and a couple of tablets, and rented another robot. Really need 4, at least until they get used to it, then 3 will work. We were laying a 16' mat of 3-3.5" compacted, so they weren't moving too fast to keep up. When we lay the 1.5" of surface, going to use ski poles to take out any remaining ripples, so won't need the robots at that point.

Nice. Way more than I need but nice just the same.

I'm teething on a John Deere 650 right now.
We are using the sonar setup on our grader right now but that string for the first pass is a real pain.
I'd really like to get my excavators set up to speed up pipe laying.
Walking still, maybe I'll be jogging by the end of 2015. Running is so far down the line it's hard to see from here but at least my knees are heeled up from all the crawling.

Merry Christmas