If you want to learn more about how dirt roads are made through dust compaction, you can take a tour of the construction sight and learn about all of the machinery for the job.This is especially useful if you are a teacher and want your students to learn about mining and geotechnical work. When you contact a road construction company and ask for a tour, you and your students will probably see all of the following machines on the tour. The following information will help you and your students identify the machines and what they do.

Stone Crusher

This machine takes the local large rocks and crushes them into smaller rocks. When the contractor uses a top layer of aggregate over the dust-compacted road, he or she will need and use a stone crusher to reduce the cost of importing aggregate or shipping in large stones to be crushed. The rocks are conveyed into the crusher and the aggregate is spewed out the other side. It closely resembles a very large rock tumbler.

"Feeders" and Conveyors

These machines feed or convey large rocks into a stone crusher and then into a grinding mill. If the contractor does not use a feeder or conveyer belt, he or she will have to use cranes and manual labor to feed the rocks through the process, which is very slow and technically very dangerous for the crew. You and your students may not get an opportunity to see how conveyors work and how they help with the rock mining and road construction process, depending on which types of machinery the construction company uses to move the rocks and feed them into a crusher or grinder.

Grinders

Grinders differ from stone crushers in that the grinders take aggregate and pulverize it into the dust necessary to build the base of the dirt road. Every load of aggregate ground into dust will need to be jettisoned into a dump truck to be transported to the road's building site. To do this, the workers will either use a chute to disperse the sand/dust or a bucket conveyor to catch, collect and dump the sand/dust into the back of a dump truck.

Asphalt Pavers

Even though no asphalt will be laid onto the dust-compacted road, the asphalt paver is still an essential machine to the road building process. As each new layer of dust/sand is laid, the paver rolls back and forth across it, squeezing any pocketed air out and flattening the makeshift road. It also irons out any bumps that begin to form from larger, heavier trucks carrying dirt and dust farther out onto the road's current end. This is a good spot to stop and take some class photos because the students can get a really good feel for just how large the paver's wheels really are.

For more information, contact a company like D W Jensen Drilling Ltd.