Using Plate Compactors on Asphalt Millings

Watch as Jared and Jake test drive the lineup of RuggedMade reversible plate compactors.

Video Transcript

Welcome back to RuggedMade. I'm Jared and I'm Jake from Dude Ranch DIY. So, we're down here visiting Jake in Connecticut and we've been having a great time filming videos on seeing him take down trees, all kinds of good stuff, but we also have seen him progress with his firewood business. And, one of the things, one of the big changes, is the wood lot he's got. He's put down all these asphalt millings. Yeah, I was busy since the last time you guys came down and I brought in about 40-something loads of asphalt millings and tri-axle dump trucks and all we really did was spread them out and compact them with the excavator and trucks and tractors and stuff driving back and forth but that's pretty much it.

Yeah, so RuggedMade may be best known for our log splitters, but we also offer a line of construction equipment, primarily plate compactors, so we figured, why not cross the streams, bring these down, and help Jake do a little bit of compacting with these asphalt millings. Yeah, I'm pretty excited to see what these things do. I've used them, not yours, but I've used a plate compactor before and it was pretty impressive but this one is much bigger than the one I ever used. That's our RCH-780. Weighs about 780 pounds. That's on this kind of substrate that should get some good compaction and hopefully it'll help your buildings last longer and be kind of neater when you're operating on them. Shouldn't get torn up quite as easy but I'm curious to see how it works, so let's get fired up and get things packed out. Cool, let's do it.

We did some compacting of your millings with our RCH-260, the RCH-280, and our RCH-780. What did you think of the before and after? I was pretty impressed. I've never, as I said before, never done any formal compaction on this stuff and it did a great job. I mean, you can see over here how much smoother it is over here where we worked it versus over here where there's still really big chunks and it just looks a lot rougher. I was really impressed, especially with the larger machine, how quickly you run over a big chunk of the asphalt and it… Yeah. A lot of these chunks were this loose, almost sitting on top. Right, and we went over it and it just, it’s basically flush. It just pushes them down. You can see when it rides up on top of it and then you can watch the side of the compaction plate just get flush again. [It happened] really quickly on this one and these ones still did it, this one just did it… I was impressed with how fast it did it. Yeah. And, considering what they're doing, [it’s] really smooth. I thought there was going to be a ton of vibration and stuff in the handle but that wasn't really the case. Yep, got that rubber isolator. Yeah, and the reverse neutral and forward was really nice, too. Even with this big, heavy machine, you felt like you had total control over it. Yeah, there are a few spots, I mean, I think if we were going to spend all day finishing this off, we'd have moved the totes but we were kind of getting in between totes like a vacuum cleaner just in and out, in and out and worked pretty well.

Yeah, so, well, time will tell. You're on it every day with your equipment. We'll see how it holds up to turning with the tractor and things like that, and winter, and plowing but yeah, maybe we'll finish this up in the spring with another round. That would be great. All right, well we had a great visit down here at Dude Ranch DIY with Jake. It's been really fun. Yeah. Thanks for coming down, guys.