JOB: Paving Project on Youngstown Expressway
CONTRACTOR: Keffler Construction, Canfield, Ohio
Bid-Well Paver’s Time and Tolerance Performance Produces Incentive for Ohio Contractor

It was supposed to be a two-year project with tight tolerances; a real paving challenge. Keffler Construction and its Bid-Well 5000 Paver met the challenge and exceeded both time and tolerance expectations. To say that Keffler’s first attempt at roadway paving was a success is an understatement.

Keffler already owned four Bid-Well pavers that were used for bridge paving. For their first project involving roadway paving Keffler bought a Bid-Well 5000 paver for the I-76 Youngstown Expressway paving project near Youngstown, Ohio. The project called for 11,300 feet of 41-foot wide, 14-inch paving on the eastbound and the same on the westbound lanes of the expressway.

Keffler formed the outside of the eastbound lane and poured it as a unit, then flipped traffic around and poured the westbound lane. The smoothness requirements were very strict. Both sides of the project were well under the profilograph tolerances set by the state and resulted in significant incentives for the company. And then there was the completion schedule.

“We finished eleven months early,” Dave Keffler Sr., President of Keffler Construction, said. “Our completion date was September 30th of 2000, and we wrapped up the project the end of October, 1999. It was set up as a two-year job and we completed it in less than seven months. When we first planned this job we were going to do it with the smaller Bid-Well pavers we already owned, but I sat down with the folks at Bid-Well and they showed me some other paving jobs the 5000 had performed on and they also gave me some good ideas about how to really make that machine work for us. Obviously it did.”

While this is Keffler’s first experience with Bid-Well on a road paving project, their experience with Bid-Well goes much further back.

“We have done business with Bid-Well for more than 35 years,” Keffler said. “Bid-Well builds a unique machine. We also have their texturing/curing machine in addition to the five pavers.”

Keffler’s successful first experience at roadway paving with the Bid-Well 5000 is leading to more projects.

“Right now the state of Ohio has three jobs on the books almost identical to the one we did,” Keffler said. “We are essentially bridge contractors, but this experience has worked out very well. We can plan the pavement around the bridge work also. We did both on this job.”
Bid-Well is an industry leader in the development and manufacture of a wide variety of versatile and specialized concrete paving machines for construction markets. This includes road and airport pavers, bridge deck pavers and overlay machines, and pavers and graders for slope and canal paving.