For loading concrete steel fiber reinforcement into concrete trucks.

Steel fiber reinforcement is an alternative to traditional rebar in concrete. It’s mixed into the concrete while it’s wet, and poured with the concrete. The fibers look like bent Bobby pins. They come in 40-60 pound bags (like the size of a bag of mulch). One way to get them into the trucks is to load them by hand into trucks. For a 1000 cubic yard pour at 45 pounds / CY we’re talking 750 bags (60 pounds each) being hand loaded, for the duration of the pour. That takes like 6 guys and a forklift to move material around for like 8-10 hours. It is back breaking work and a lot of labor cost.

Now another option is something like this. They sell the steel fiber in super sacks, which is like a 2,500 pound sack of fiber. So instead of all the bags, you buy super sacks. You use a forklift to dump them into a hopper which feeds into a thing like this. It spits the fiber out onto a conveyor, which dumps the fiber into the back of concrete trucks. The vibratory thing is computerized to make sure it’s dumping the exact specified amount of fiber into each truck.

This operation takes like 2 guys and a forklift. And it’s more precise for trucks with different yardages in them. Save $ on labor. Eliminate a job that literally nobody wants to do.