A Whole Years Work in 2 Months?
May 6th, 2008The city of San Bruno, California’s, street department is usually able to repair about 2,500 square feet of asphalt during their fiscal year. Time and money just wouldn’t allow more than that.
However, like every other city in California, they have been affected by budget cutbacks and were seeking for a less expensive way to repair their streets.
Gino Quinn, field supervisor for the streets division, decided to take a look at the Asphalt Zipper to see if it could live up its claims of increased production. The demonstration he witnessed showed him all he needed to know.
He calculated that the AZ-300, the 30” wide attachment for a backhoe, would pay for itself easily in savings alone. He was right.
The city of San Bruno took delivery of their new Zipper on February 12. In two months they have already repaired 6,000 square feet of streets using the Zipper. That is more than twice as much as they normally do in a whole year!
Their second repair job was a large 980 square foot patch. The method they would normally use to repair this would be to first saw cut the perimeter, jackhammer a hole for the backhoe to start and excavate all the asphalt out. Then it would be loaded onto a truck and transported to a recycling yard.
Some additional base would have to be brought in. It would then have to be compacted and paved. Gino figured this job would normally take 2 weeks and approximately 350 man hours.
With his new Asphalt Zipper he was able to Zip the patch full depth, clean out the excess material, compact and lay the first lift of asphalt in one day! They came in the second day and added a second lift of asphalt to finish the job. Total man hours for this job was just 48! This process used only 3-4 men instead of 6-8 the old way. The savings were phenomenal!
Gino shared his savings in man hours alone. Cost of man hours to do this 980 square foot patch the traditional way would have cost him $15,759.65. His actual cost using the Asphalt Zipper was only $2,161.32. He saved $13,598.33 just on man hours alone on this one job! An 85% savings!
Gino admitted he still had to truck off the excess gravel from the job but he stockpiles it and uses it for unincorporated roads so it doesn’t go to waste. In fact it saves the city money again, because he doesn’t have to purchase new material.

