 The fact that it will take down big rock and produce something that is drivable at roughly a third or a quarter of the cost of having to bring down in a cushion of crushed rock is a major cost advantage. What I guess what we found out is the crusher is the easiest part of the operation. It runs along pretty smoothly, there's no problems with it. The hardest part is the graters and then behind that is the finish blading and the water trucks go on. We have a lot of roads like this particularly on the Rio Grande where we have material in place where this would work very well. We can now recover what was once a wasted resource and that's the oversized rock that typically lines ditches or lies in the windrows alongside the road. An hour to drive from the bottom up to here before we did the road work on here and now made it in about 15 minutes so it's providing an extremely good road surface. We're in the Chiricato Mountains right now and we're doing road restoration on the Onion Saddle Piney Road and this road has not had this kind of maintenance in probably 20 or 25 years and the road surface had become cobbles and a real uncomfortable road to drive for a arterial road. We were fortunate to find a mobile rock crusher that we were able to bring up here and start the process that this first time it's happened in the country. Finding is that it will crush anything that we have in this area from the Luvio Fan material which is the round cobbles, the river stone up into the material up on top here which is fairly fractured and easy to break up so hardness has not been a problem at all. We pull material from the ditches and we scarify the roadbed trying to scarify it down about 6 inches and utilize all the material up to 12 inches in diameter including 12 inches and then windrow that into the middle of the roadway. There we add water in order to keep the dust down and provide moisture to the soil trying to get to optimum moisture content. At that point we bring the crusher in and it makes its pass and in one pass it takes all of that material and crushes it into between one inch and one and a half inch minus. It runs along pretty smoothly there's no problem with that but it takes the hard work and the coordination. It's keeping everything else around and running. We've got two motor graders running what we have to do first thing in the morning is have both of them go ahead of the crusher and rip the road and form the windrow. You get far enough ahead to where the crusher has plenty of work to do so he doesn't end up stopping. The road is very narrow, it's windy, the biggest problem actually is water. It's very dry, it's dryest time of the year and getting water has been a real challenge. We've got the public traveling on the road so we have to stop them for upwards of an hour at a time but most of the people who have had to stop have been pretty friendly and most of them are bird watchers. They stop, watch the birds while they wait and I guess they realize that they're out for us and they shouldn't be in a big hurry and they relax and enjoy it. This project is on the Canaos River Road which serves a primary access from the state highway to a federal highway it's a through road. The reason why we chose this project of course one was the fact that the material lent itself to this type of an operation and we felt that it would work. The road basically was not even gravel. Gravel was all worn out what little there was and we felt that we could get a large amount of work done at a fairly reasonable cost. You can stand right beside the machine while it's working. You can use it on a main road and still route traffic right by the machine while it's working. With the exception of the crusher itself it can be done with equipment that we all have and that the counties have so there's no specialized equipment needed other than the crusher itself. So I think the potential for this type of a project is substantial on most of our forests here in Colorado. What we have here, this is the part of the machine that does all the work. It's our rotating drum. It rotates at about a thousand rpm. The machine has a 225 horsepower cat engine and a three to one transmission reduction. This drum will rotate up and these hammers lift the material up against the anvils up on top and crush it. And if you take a look in there closely you can see the distance between the hammer and the anvil. The crushed rock has to be that size before it will come out the back of the machine. Different than other equipment you have intense amount of repairs, intense amount of maintenance that's needed with this. You have to have service trucks with it that are equipped welders, torches, just the whole nine yards. It requires a lot of heavy maintenance and dedication by the employees. About a couple hours a day at least and that's changing the hammers and that's checking over different items that may have broken. The crusher generally undergoes some serious vibration as it goes through the rock and crushes it. And that just tends to pull everything apart over time. Once the material goes through the crusher we can expect with new hammers approximately two inches and minus. And as the hammers begin to wear we'll get up to four inch minus material as the hammers just begin to drop. And we usually don't go any more now because by that point we're getting too close to that rotor and we will either try and protect that rotor. We're out here today on Dixie Mountain Lookout Road for a mobile rock crushing demonstration. Dixie Mountain Lookout Road is on Plumas National Forest in California. This project has been a partnership between the San Dimas Technology and Development Center Region 5, our regional office, and the Plumas National Forest. It's a single laying road, fairly steep gradient, going up to Dixie Mountain Lookout. A possible road for us to maintain. With the cobbles and the donikers in the road we couldn't blade it anymore. We were looking at almost the total reconstruction if we wanted to do any improvements to this road. Plus the cost of bringing in material to improve this road with the minimal traffic that's on it, it didn't warrant the cost. I'm Tim Pasquale with the Cordo National Forest Equipment Operator out of Tucson, Arizona. Here working on the Plumas National Forest, Dixie Mountain Lookout Road. This project is a little different than what we have worked on in previous projects due to the fact it's a level two type road. It's not as wide as what we're used to. It's a little different, whereas the windrows are a little more intensive in terms of building them. It takes a little more time. It can be very tedious, but running in a crush you always got to be aware of changes at the level of the road. You got to constantly be aware of the RPMs and your power unit on your machine, keeping them constantly working together. Ideal size is anything below 16 inch diameter and lower because of the size of the opening that it feeds into the machine. It does an amazingly good job of breaking up this type of very coarse rocky material that has been a real maintenance problem in the past on this particular road. A particular rock on this project is a mixture of a volcanic rock in an ashy matrix. It's fairly hard rock. The machine seems to be keeping up at a production rate at it, comparable to what they've seen on other projects and what we saw down on the lower part of this project in some of the softer rocks, so it seems capable of handling very hard rock. My overall impression of this machine is that it's an excellent tool in a fairly specific type of application where if you've got roads like this one was where it's very bony, if you've got roads that have a lot of coarse material, rock on it, it's ideal because it can give you a surfacing that's not as high a standard as a crushed agate, but it's a suitable surfacing that's a lot better than a very rocky surface for about a half to a third to cost. One of the reasons we picked this road as a demonstration is it was a road that was extremely difficult to maintain. The lookout who drove up and down here, I talked to him when we were up looking at it and considering this road and he just said I'm beating my truck apart and this was a road that was so bony that you could not maintain it. So the beauty of this tool on this road is it'll come in here and take a section, crush that rock down so that you have a road that is maintainable. We have a lot of remote roads that are a long way from a commercial rock source and when you can take a road like this and make it maintainable for $10,000 a mile range, you've got a tool that will work. Before I came I didn't really have any idea what to expect, I kind of expected what you'd see dumped out of a belly dump, nice graded rock, but you knew that wasn't going to happen. The real test of this road is going to be two years from now and you come back here, has it compacted down, has it maintained itself, are we able to maintain a drivable surface? This is an area that does not get extremely heavy rainfall or else these fines would have washed off this road already. So I think we picked an ideal site. I think the future of this technology really comes into having the technology somewhere in the region. We have 18 forests here that all have a few roads that could benefit from this type of technology.