THE BIG PROGRAMME

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 116, 13 November 1923, Page 8

THE BIG PROGRAMME

ROADING PLANT BEING LANDED

EEADY FOR A START.

To-day the big American-made roadmaking machinery is being landed from the Tregenna by the contracting suppliers, and will be transpprted to the site arranged for. by the council and erected immediately. This will spell heavy work, but special lifts and hoists are being got ready for the assembling of the parts without delay. The new plant will have a capacity for 800 yards of mixed .material per day, double that of the small plant at present being used for city streets, and it may be that the problem which will face the engineers will not be to lay the full 1200 yards per day (assuming that both machines are working at full capacity at one place or another) so much as to feed the mixers with metal, for which they have amazing appetites, not merely of tons per day but rather of a hundred or so tons each day. The rotary crusher recently installed at the Ngahauranga quarry also has a very fair appetite for metal, running it through and grading at such a rate that the Clyde quay' mixer cannot keep it going' more than naif time, and providing storage can be made available that crusher—a tiger l»r work though a futilo-looking machine when looked at casually—should be able to keep the two mixers going, for, while bitumen roading may b e laid only when weather conditions are fair and warm, the crusher smashes away wet and fine' Roughly, 70,000 yards of material will be laid on the Hutt road in the building of the new surface, and though theoretically the new 800-yards-a-day mixer should gallop over the full distance is under 90 days, it is likely enough that the work will not be completed m less than the two years allowed for in the specifications, for Wellmgton s weather is not always as might be hoped, transport difficulties may crop up, or the mixers: may outpace the crushers.

Just what.procedure is to be followed in the laying of. the surface, three inches of black base, two inches of inter mediate and finer mix, one and a half inches of running surface and the final seal coating of pure bitumen and strewn quarry chipping, will probably b' made public very shortly. That is, of course, if the .Wellington City /Council is to do the work; but it may be that before 29th November, a contractor, as yet unknown, may, with a few passes of the hand, conjure up a second £10,000 plant, a sufficiency of bitumen, and an adequate source of metai Supply, and thus be in a position to eubmit'a tender which the City Council, as the controlling body under the 1917 Act, must accept. The council, however,' has decided that the work must be put under way next mouth, and lest no contractor should come forward, is now getting ready its big plant, taking stock of bitumen and oiling up the crusher. Should no tender be received, an 'immediate start may be made, even though the mixer itself may not be completely assembled, for considerable preliminary .work must be done,on the road surface before the bituminous mix can be laid down. '..■■•■