Rapid rural road rehabilitation in Sicily

It’s a picturesque landscape of hills and tight curves. But when the roads need renovating, Sicily’s dreamy views can become concrete nightmares. The site logistics and the choice of equipment have to be carefully planned to maintain the flow of traffic. The contracting company decided on the W 210 Fi large milling machine, which could mill up the entire roadway in two-to-three milling cuts.

The lengths of the individual sections of the rehabilitation project varied between 50 and 500 m. For rehabilitation measures 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? The machine delivers the desired milling pattern directly with the first cut, even on short sections. 

Consistent milling quality

“I’ve been working with Wirtgen equipment for a long time, including milling machines of this size. And I must say that I’m really impressed by the new features of the F-Series,” says Roberto Prainito, owner of the contracting company Sicilstrade. The Mill Assist system monitors milling quality and delivers a perfect surface right from the first metre. The results are consistently good on each individual section, no matter whether it’s 50 m long to a milling depth of 3 cm or 500 m long to a depth of 5 cm. This lets the driver focus entirely on the loading process and on keeping the milling cut in line. The individual sections could therefore be milled off in record time, enabling the completion of several sections per day.

Its outstanding manoeuvrability combined with the high material offloading capacity and flexibility made the machine the ideal choice for the project on these winding roads. An experienced paving team from Sicilstrade was always on site, ready to fill in each new section 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 to traffic. “We are only working on small sections here, and the machine does a superb job. I can hardly wait to see how it performs on a bigger construction project,” says Prainito. 

Automatic functions save time

A whole range of automatic 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 sections especially easy.

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Pic 1 & 2: Classic mill-and-fill tasks were quickly accomplished by the W 210 Fi – even in tight curves.

Pic 3: One clear advantage of the new Wirtgen F-Series technology: The machine delivered the desired milling pattern directly with the first cut, even on short sections.

Pic 4: Raffaele Centonze (Wirtgen machine) and Roberto Prainito, owner of Sicilstrade, are satisfied with the milling results.