Asphalt/bitumen roller

AFAIK it's been years since asphalt was used (a natural product); it's all bitumen. From my primary years, where the school paving was asphalt, I remember it softening and coming up in clumps in Melbourne heat. There were famous incidents in the late 1950s and early 1960s where women wearing stiletto heels would become bogged to the axles and trapped.
I was intending to post just the machine, but the technology is just as interesting.
During an open day at Melbourne's ice-skating rink (Docklands), the design engineer explained how the ice surface was smoothed each night to provide the perfect conditions for sport next day.
Roderick

191106W Melbourne 'Herald Sun' - Asphalt FX

I know the country is in drought but the photo looks more like Alice Springs than Melbourne.

Roderick Smith wrote: AFAIK it's been years since asphalt was used (a natural product); it's all bitumen.

In Australia, generally considered that BITUMEN is the petroleum based 'by product' from refining and is not laid with a roller. It is blended with aggregate, sand, lime etc to produce ASPHALT (hotmix) which is then laid and rolled. BITUMEN can be sprayed and then covered with aggregate (spray or chip seal).

I don't know the technical terms. Mayby have always been interchangeable. A while ago, I read a book of short stories by one of the early Australian writer/poets. In it was a story told to the author by an oldtimer, lamenting the sealing of roads with "Bitch-er-man."
He said that "They were not REAL roads any more.

Bitumen is like chewing gum at normal temps,drum bitumen is cut with either kerosine or made in a water emulsion.....if you arent careful spraying the emulsion you get water pockets in it.Bruce Dickson bought some old trailer tanks off Bitupave ,and left the valve on one open.....didnt look like anything was coming out,so he never shut it off......two years later he discovered his whole paddock covered in sticky black under then grass......didnt seem to damage the grass.,and in winter it was solid....not so much in summer.......talk about sticky,and one of the horses fell over in it.Horse owner next door wasnt impressed.

He also got Leyland with a tank on it ,and he wanted to use the tank ....truck still had the gas burner setup ,so we got some gas ,and got it going....plenty of heat into the tank..trouble was the furnace inside the tank had a leak ,and when the bitumen got hot and fluid ,it leaked thru into the furnace....plenty of black smoke and flames 100 ft high..Leyland got burnt out,fire brigade came ,more bitumen spilled on the ground....long time ago,in a land far away...Willawong....Islami s own the yard now,wonder if they know how much is buried there.

Having that mess on the ground would only make them feel at home and think they had struck crude oil and be rich.
I spent a couple of years while in road construction laying hotmix and sealing areas with gravel and bitumen. I was good in the winter you were kept warm by the hotmix, a bugga in the summer.

As one of my two fill in jobs after my apprenticeship, I worked on a hotmix gang doing road reconstruction jobs around Sydney.

Bitumen/ Apshaplt is Hotmix, Usually laid to a depth of 6 inches while spray sealing is emoleum laid over an existing surface with the gravel spread evenly and rolled into it.
I was the plant operator (Bomac 2 wheel roller) in the gang of 8. We did all the work shovelling out of the back of a Ford Cargo, we did rather large projects but not big enough to use a automated machine which seems to have trouble laying flat up against concrete bridges which we could achieve without a problem by hand laying and me rolling flush.

Next time you approach a bridge in your truck thank the automated machinery for making it a rough bounce.

Never thought there was much to it until the first time you drive the roller onto freshly laid Hotmix and trying to judge the sink rate of the machine over the surface. Head ganger would spread the mix a lot higher than the finished product to get it right.

Allen Bros machinery on display at Campbelltown Steam Museum 2019

Love the streamlining of the guards and bonnet. That'd be good for an extra 1 mph!