Road Badger reconditioner set to clean up washboard surfaces

t has been a long, bumpy and sometimes winding road for the technologists, engi-neers and entrepreneurs developing the Road Badger. Eight years of design, pro-totyping and testing are now behind them and backers of this innovative, made-in-Alberta road condi-tioning machine are seriously set to hit the roads in Canada, and beyond, to market their product.

“Dedicated ‘technical people’ and engineering groups spent time with us to develop the product. They gave freely of their time and were very helpful,” says Edmonton businessman Ray Gillard, presi-dent of Road Badger Inc. and the driving force behind the project. Gillard is thankful for the input of the likes of Ric Lyseng, C.E.T.. Through his firm, Dancam Design and Drafting Ltd., Lyseng contributed significantly to the mechanical design as well as the material and component selection for the Road Badger. “I worked with Ray on this from shortly after conception, start-ing about six years ago. We followed up and made the changes to make it work better,” notes Lyseng, whose usual work involves machinery design related to drilling rigs and pipelines. The Road Badger project represented Lyseng’s first major foray into design of road-maintenance equipment. “Still, it’s a heavy piece of equipment that can put up with the abuse it will see, and that’s the same with pipeline and drilling equipment. We made it tough.” Their efforts have resulted in equipment that represents a vast improvement over what has been available to date to recondition gravel or lightly surfaced roads and unpaved runways. Not only can Road Badger do this at a fraction of the cost of existing meth-ods but it also produces a ‘good-as-new’ surface without having to pile more gravel or oil on the existing road. Repairing existing roads relieves road builders, municipalities and resource companies of the cost of finding and delivering new surfacing material. The environment also benefits since repairs re-duce creation of greenhouse gases when materials are extracted and transported to sites. To achieve all this, the Road Badger depends on a dual scarify-ing system, which can be adjusted to varying depths (from 1/2 to six inches), and a dual offset disking system, which lifts, resizes and mixes the existing road surface material (including oiled sur-faces) to meet specifications. It is possible to allow binders to be added at this time, then

I to have the material compacted through grading, machine-com-pacting or the existing traffic flow. The ground-engaging tools rely on Road Badger’s high-pres-sure hydraulic system, which is powered by a four-cylinder, air-cooled diesel engine mounted on the 20,000-lb. unit. The machine itself is pulled behind any power unit, such as a tractor, loader, truck or grader that can generate the needed torque and horsepower. From the power unit, the operator runs the Road Badger via a radio-controlled, handheld keypad. Co-lour-coded lights on the control panel alert the operator to various functions, including surface penetration. The fact that it is not self-propelled adds flexibility and cost benefits, particularly for smaller cash-tight municipalities. It means their investment is not tied up in another power source, plus exist-ing power units can be employed elsewhere when not hitched to a Road Badger, which sells for $230,000. Garett Schmidt, company vice-president of operations and sales, worked with Lyseng and others to develop the unit’s key hydraulic and electrical components and other on-board systems using a total of 10 different prototypes. A variety of difficult field situations were used as test beds. Tests have taken place from permafrost regions just below the Arctic Circle to the wet and steamy tropical jungles of Ecuador. EnCana Corp., which earlier evaluated a Road Badger prototype at

Pelican Lake in north-central Alber-ta, acquired one for service roads run by its subsidiary AEC Ecuador. Based on continuous improve-ment, the company saved an average $34,000 a month on main-taining its oilfield roads close to the Ecuador-Colombia border. Closer to home, a Road Badger this summer was barged via the Mackenzie River to Norman Wells, N.W.T., where it was used for two weeks. Earlier this summer, the

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Tests have taken place from perma-frost regions just below the Arctic Circle to the wet and steamy tropical jungles of Ecuador.

Ray Gillard with a new machine ready to ship.

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company worked with the Alberta Infrastructure/Transportation and Environment departments to rehabilitate 28 km of canal-em-bankment roads in the Fort Macleod area of southern Alberta.

Use it and see Innovation hasn’t been confined to just the technical aspects of their product at Road Badger. Through the company’s Integrated Testing and Evaluation Pro-gram (ITEP), customers can use the unit and then, based on an independent third-party evaluation, pay an amount equal to what it saved relative to its traditional road-rehabilitation methods. “It’s a way for municipalities and others to try out the Road Bad-ger while we bear the risk,” says Schmidt. He adds that along with direct sales, ITEP is a key element of the firm’s marketing strategy and an important way of demonstrating their machine’s benefits. Road Badger’s developers came upon the idea of develop-ing a better and more effective method of reconditioning roads

in the mid-1990s. Counties in the Edmonton-area faced increased complaints and costs due to wear on unpaved roads caused by trucks hauling solid waste from treatment plants to outlying fields. From that localized need, Gillard now foresees almost limitless opportunities for his product stretching along North America’s estimated three million km of public gravel roads. Cast the net worldwide and there are an estimated seven million km of gravel-surfaced public roads. Add to that countless more private resources roads, some 9,000 unpaved airstrips in the U.S. and 800 in Canada and the road is wide open. Company executives are currently contemplating a potential demand for more than 15,000 machines in North America alone. That could make Road Badgers a fairly common sight and lead to safer, more environmentally friendly and cost-efficient rides on many of our rural roads. ∞

Breaking and mixing a cold mix road (left) twice produces results above.