| The Stark Companies of Bloomington, IL, is a
diverse construction company involved in
concrete batching, excavating, flatwork and now
slipform paving. Late last year the owner, David
Stark, decided it was time to step up the
concrete paving aspect of his business. For
years they had been putting in roads with a
bridge deck style paver, but weren't getting the
production they needed in order to stay
competitive.
After several consultations with the regional
salesman from Allen, Stark decided that a custom
built machine would be required to meet their
needs. This machine would need to be a heavier
version of the standard Allen Model 12-27. The
Allen engineers designed and built a machine
with a much deeper and heavier mainframe. As a
result, a new model was born, the Model 12-36
XHD. This new machine is capable of spanning up
to 36´ feet in width, thanks to the new extra
heavy duty frame.
The Stark Companies have now been paving with
their new machine for 10 months. Chris Ryan,
Stark Companies project super-visor, is
thoroughly pleased with the machine’s
performance, quality and production results.
Chris states that, “we can now pave twice as
much concrete with half the labor, and the
quality of the finished product we put out is
much higher.” Chris added, “we now put down, on
average, 125 yards an hour, but feel that the
machine is easily capable of 200 yards an hour
if we could get the concrete delivered
faster.”
To date, most of Stark’s paving projects have
been new residential concrete streets for the
city of Bloomington. They are now expanding
their projects to include county and state work,
because of the confidence they have in the Allen
Engineering 12-36 XHD slip form
paver. |
