Compact Dowel Bar Inserter
When slipform paving of concrete highways began in the mid-1950s, there has been a need for mechanical Dowel Bar lnserters (DBI) to eliminate the costs and constraints associated with dowel supporting baskets. The DBI eliminates the extra cost of the supporting dowel baskets, the manpower to handle them and allows concrete to be dumped on grade in front of the paver at high production rates. G&Z and its licensee SGME-Moser (Belgium) pioneered and introduced the first successful DBI technology in Europe starting in the mid-1970s and G&Z repeated this success in the U.S.A. and Canada starting in the late 1980s / early 1990s. When developing G&Z's 2nd Generation Compact Dowel Bar Inserter (CDBI) in late 1990s, G&Z focused on making their successful DBI technology even better by making the CDBI a single, self-supporting, "compact" module which could be easily added and removed from the rear of the paver. The optional CDBI self-loading kit eliminates the need for a crane to load / unload the CDBI on a trailer. The CDBI is available in a Compact Configuration or Narrow Profile Configuration with bolster extensions. Both configurations allow conversion back and forth between DBI and non-DBI paving in a matter of hours. G&Z builds two model CDBIs: DBI10 for the S400 or S600 Paver or DBI15 for the S850 Paver or S1500 Paver. With G&Z's superior and time tested DBI technology, the position / alignment of the dowel bars inserted with the DBI are as good or better than those supported on baskets and homogeneous concrete is ensured around the inserted bars.
