Question regarding hauling hot mix asphalt.

The liners are great, but make sure you get the correct material to handle the heat.

 

Inspectors? On Pennsylvania roads??????

c'mon, you're pulling our legs.

 

When they speak of plywood lining, they are talking about the sidewalls and the tailgate. Not the floor. If you put plywood on the floor you are going to have a mess after one load as the place where hot mix sticks the most is on the floor. The sides aren't too bad. An exhaust heater is probably the best bet, but to retro a truck with it after the fact is probably going to be pretty expensive. I'm not 100% sure you can even use those plastic liners to haul hot mix. Unless they make some of them out of heat resistant materials, I'm pretty sure hot mix would melt most of them.

 

That's odd. I haul asphalt in northern Ontario in cooler temps than down south and I often have asphalt sitting in the truck for up to 8 hours with no liner and my heat off. (I do have an exhaust heated box.) After 8 hours it starts to get pretty crusty.
But the plants here make it hot enough a wood liner would never work.

Only time I ever run the box heat is if it's raining or wet roads as the spray off the tires will cool the floor and you end up getting some stickage above the drive tires.

And if you get a plastic liner, it has to be an asphalt liner. They are not all the same.

 

This is what I was thinking of when you said plywood on a dump bed, a lot of guys used to have something like this years ago when hauling asphalt around here.

 

I must be a different bird then, Ive run blacktop in the heat of day without any of that plywood or heating done. There is diesel applied occasionally to the inside overnight (So much for EPA lolz) to make it non stick.

When it's bad weather or winter we simply stay home on half pay (Unemployment) until back to work when it gets warm enough around 1st of march give or take a few days.

Of the three, I have to say a exhaust based heating system is the best. Plywood buys time but not on the floor ever. It will be giant mess. When it is cool or otherwise cold, we simply do not lay blacktop until after it warms up again. These were mostly either parking lots or peoples driveways so it's needed to be done right.

The only time we run any kind of heating is during the fall when the frost is bad. that Tar is too thick to use for sealant so we run exhaust off the nearest vehicle at high idle into the tar to thaw it out a few hours prior to using it at the job. We did not do that too often. But it is part of what we did usually a year after a driveway is poured it needs sealing.

Hauls are not that long, from the plant to job is usually a hour tops if that. On jobs far enough away we run two dumps to meet halfway, swap drivers and load so we can get twice the usual material out and laid properly. I remember a day we put down about 110 yards on a common road once. That was pretty much the extent of our work there closest to road building.

 

There is some kind of industrial "soap" that is used, and most plants have a spray rack and provide the material, but in my opinion, it's junk and doesn't work well. There is no substitute for spraying good old fashioned diesel fuel in the body. I always carried a garden sprayer filled with it and discretely sprayed it in through the coal chute.

 

Ya, up here they mandate soap, but with the rubber polymer super pave we use it doesn't work worth ####. That's why I rigged up my own fuel sprayers.

 

Never used a heated box here in NY, hauls are all under 20 miles. the stuff will stay hot for hours as long as the plant is putting the heat to it. All the plants have soap for your box, nobody uses it, we all have a little sprayer in the cab loaded with feul.