A contractor in northern Austria has been using a Wirtgen W 100 CFi cold milling machine with a specially designed deep milling unit to lay fibre-optic cables.
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The town of Engelhartszell in the Austrian state of Upper Austria is the latest town in the region to have broadband internet service connected via fibre-optic cable.
Local contractor Hemmelmair Frastechnik was appointed for the installation. For the road profiling and trench-digging work, Hemmelmair opted for a Wirtgen W 100 CFi cold milling machine (usually known as a profiler in Australia) and a new type of cutting wheel designed specifically for this job.
Hemmelmair discussed the requirements for the job with Wirtgen’s product management team and the order was placed with Wirtgen’s design department in Germany.
“We wanted our customer to be able to use the milling machine flexibly, i.e. be able to switch back to conventional repair jobs as quickly as possible,” Wirtgen customer service manager Manfred Stiegler says.
The end result was a custom housing containing a narrow cutting wheel fitted with standard W6 picks mounted behind the folded-in crawler track on the right. With a large cutting diameter of 1,620mm, it can mill channels up to 600mm deep and 300mm wide. The rotary milling motion conveys the milled material upwards, where it is discharged via a baffle plate and chute.
The deep milling unit is controlled directly via the control panel inside the W 100 CFi, meaning one operator can complete multiple jobs.
“The easy assembly and dismantling of the deep milling unit and the straightforward transport of the W 100 CFi allows us to use the milling machine flexibly and thus optimally,” Hemmelmair managing director Manfred Grossing says.