How High Can A Cement Truck Pour?

If you’re interested in knowing how high a cement truck can pour, then you came to the right page. In this article, we’ll provide you with a response to the question — How High Can A Cement Truck Pour? — and give you further details about a cement truck, in case you have other questions about what a cement truck is.

How High Can A Cement Truck Pour?

On average, the farthest distance concrete can be placed using a chute is 18 feet, measured from the truck’s tires to the point of discharge.

How Cement Mixers Work

It’s easy to comprehend most construction equipment. We know how cranes function, they move things up and down. As for dump trucks, they load up, pull out and also, they unload. Graders grade and bulldozer push. There’s an exception, and that’s the cement mixer. It’s a kind of vehicle loved by kids, hated by those drivers in a hurry, and misunderstood by a lot of people outside the cab of the 30,000-pound (13,608-kilogram) behemoths.

While it’s no doubt that concrete has been in existence even before the Romans were done with building the Apian Way, the transit mixer is regarded as a child of the 20th century. But, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a recent invention or not, it — the mixer — is something that’s here to stay. Where people tend to first misunderstand the cement mixer is “the name.” What is popularly referred to as a cement mixer is, in the construction industry, known as a concrete mixer and you can get it in a variety of sizes, types, and configurations in order to handle the numerous number of tasks set before it on a daily basis.

That need to serve in diverse areas simply means that the machine is incredibly dynamic, changing form and shape as people’s needs around using concrete also change. Before we move further, let’s give you a clear difference between concrete and cement. It’s very important that you understand the difference, so that whenever you see cement and concrete together, there’ll be no confusion. Let’s use baking terms to give you an idea: the difference between cement and concrete is the difference between the floor and a full loaf of bread.

The word “concrete” is known as a generic term for a mix of aggregate — most times, it’s gravel or stone, cement, and water. Modern cement is simply a complex blend of ground materials, finely ground materials, and it has a generic name, that’s “Portland.” How do you make concrete? You can achieve the state of concrete by mixing the three ingredients inside a mixer — whether the mixer is moving down the road or it’s stationary, and the cement absorbs the water. Now, after the cement absorbs the water, it then ensures that the aggregate is bind together — this process creates concrete.

Types Of Cement Mixers

All the mixers you can find out there leverage torque, power, and weight distribution in order to transport the concrete to the site, but the process of getting it out of the truck is the area where you will see the differences in truck designs. A good number of the mixer fleet, especially the trucks of the older batch models, makes use of a simple method, a simple tip-and-pour method in a bid to ensure the concrete is out of the mixer. There’s something called a chute that attaches to a port and this makes the concrete ooze out of the mixer right to the project.

Usually, the truck’s driver does two things — operates the machinery and aims the chute. Many of the transit mixers out there are coupled to a hydraulic lift bed. This hydraulic lift bed has the potential of tipping up the drum, just like a dump truck, if really needed. Other trucks make use of a pump in order to move the concrete to the project, from the truck. The pumps, mostly reciprocating piston pumps, can either be mounted on the rear or the front of the truck. If the pump takes the front position, it makes it easy for the driver to maneuver to a specific section of the worksite and, from inside the cab, direct the concrete.

As for the controls, they can be hydraulic, electromechanical, mechanical, or purely electronic. The newer trucks are introducing more features — onboard computers — in order to ensure that pumps and even other components of the mixers can be monitored. Before what we know as the “concrete,” several simpler machines play a vital role as regards keeping the concrete from forming, and even create a mixture of the concrete at the site. A few of the fleet’s older portions, just like early mixers, employed the use of paddles for the purpose of stirring the concrete and keeping it from “setting out,” or maybe, separating it into its different component pieces.

This very technology has enormously been replaced by the use of fins and augers. At the inside of a traditional batch mixer, you find a concentric series of fins with a slight corkscrew pattern. The drum’s spin’s direction squishes the concrete — the wet concrete — into the rear of the mixture. When the mixer gets to the site, the driver ensures he reverses the machine’s direction in order to push it away from the mixer directly to the chute. Right from that point, gravity handles the rest. Volumetric mixers make use of augers to move concrete. These are a lot similar to the blades inside the batch mixer — but they’re smaller.

At the inside of the mixer, an operator makes sure that data is taken into the mixer and a good number of augers feed cement and aggregate together. At this point, water is, again, added to the mixture, and augers — larger augers precisely — work optimally in blending the components.

Challenges To Maintaining Cement Mixers

Now, here’s the simple truth of the matter: once you see that the last of the concrete has trickled out of the drum or dribbled out of the pump — the truck is not empty. The truck always retains a small amount of concrete, especially inside the drum mixers. You can simply wash out the truck, take water and take it through the drum while it freely rotates — and make sure you even pressure-wash the inside. But always, some concrete is left. And, with time, it dries. Over time, you’ll see it becoming a problem, reducing the mixer’s volume and its capacity.

There are companies that, as a part of what they offer, serve you with the pre-treatments. That’s not all, those companies would also offer chemical and acid baths and high-pressure washes for drums and interiors. But as time goes on, you will see the concrete build to the point where the only possible alternative would be to employ mechanical removal.

A lot of smaller companies out there take it upon themselves to handle this, sending in one of their workers to carefully chip out the hardened concrete using a jackhammer. The job, which a lot of persons outside the field of construction isn’t known, was able to get its 15 minutes of fame during one of the epistles of the Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs” series, which sent host Mike Rowe to work with Jim’s Chipping Service, one of the few companies that specialize in cleaning hardened concrete.

These vehicles, which are highly specialized for these purposes, are quite pivotal to the construction business and it does not, in any way, look like they would go away in the nearest future. How exactly would cement mixers be like in the future, in terms of look?

The Future Of Cement Mixers

What the future holds for the concrete mixer is unclear. Like many industries, concrete is going “green.” The manufacturers of volumetric concrete mixers say their products are more environmentally friendly because they save fuel by mixing materials at the construction site — the trucks don’t have to run their engines to keep the concrete from setting. In addition, truck operators can create only the amount of concrete needed to finish a job — not only does this save materials, but this method also prevents dumping of excess concrete.

[source: Modern Contractor Solutions]

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How Far Can The Chute On A Concrete Truck Reach?

On average, the farthest distance concrete can be placed using a chute is 18 feet, measured from the truck’s tires to the point of discharge. The wheels of the ready-mix truck must be kept 1 foot away from below-grade walls and 1 foot away from excavations and trenches.

Will A Cement Truck Crack My Driveway?

And if you have any irrigation pipes under the driveway, . a concrete truck will crack the drive without a doubt and possibly break the irrigation pipes under it. A pumper truck or a motorized concrete buggy are the best options.

How High Can A Cement Truck Pour – Conclusion

As a recap of the response we gave to the question — How High Can A Cement Truck Pour? — we stated that:

On average, the farthest distance concrete can be placed using a chute is 18 feet, measured from the truck’s tires to the point of discharge.

Thanks for reading.

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