VÖGELE Asphalt / Pavers / Concrete Equipment For Sale

About VÖGELE

For nearly a century, German manufacturer VÖGELE has been driving innovation in the paving industry. The company makes some of the most advanced asphalt pavers, screeds, and material transfer vehicles (MTVs) around. VÖGELE is currently owned by John Deere along with other roadbuilding equipment companies in the Wirtgen Group.

History

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VOGELE SUPER 1803-3i Paver

JOSEPH VÖGELE AG was founded as a forge in 1836 by blacksmith Ulrich Joseph Vögele. The Mannheim, Germany, company initially focused on building railroad components including points, crossovers, and shunting equipment, among other things.

Nearly 90 years later, in 1925, VÖGELE started to address the burgeoning automobile market by creating pavers and mixers for asphalt and concrete streets. The firm made towed spreaders for asphalt and crushed stone in the following years, then a self-propelled spreader in 1935. Inspired by an American design, the lightweight crawler spreader had a 9.8- to 14.8-foot (3- to 4.5-meter) working width.

After World War II, VÖGELE fielded the tracked HL 50 asphalt paver in 1950. The 8.2- to 12.6-ft (2.5- to 3.85-m) wide, modern-style paver helped build Stuttgart’s famous Solitude racetrack. It was followed in 1951 by a modular, high-frequency, vibratory concrete paver based on the Schieferstein system. This paver featured a differential gearbox and crawled on tracks that could turn corners.

VÖGELE’s KL 50 asphalt paver (1953) was the first with a material hopper, and also the first to use conveyors to move the hot mix to the auger tunnel. A shorter distance from the material hopper to the smoothing unit helped the asphalt to remain hot until placed. In 1956, another modern feature appeared: the floating screed. VÖGELE’s Super 100 asphalt paver also had electric screed heating. It could lay pavement of up to 7.9 inches (200 millimeters) thick.

Although asphalt was gaining popularity as a roadbuilding material, most roads were still made being made from concrete on into the 1960s. VÖGELE’s Junior and Senior concrete paving trains could be operated by a single worker as they paved the surface course and shoulder. The company’s 500 Z and 1000 Z mixers launched in 1960.

The SUPER 100 H asphalt paver, introduced in 1962 and improved in 1966, featured the first diesel-hydraulic drive in the genre. The tracked crawler achieved the first 90% compaction level on the Marshall test, the manufacturer says. Its successor, the SUPER 150, split out individual hydraulic circuits to the tamper stroke, tamper drive, and vibrator drive in 1967. The following year, VÖGELE’s System for Automated Grade and Slope Control used hydraulically operated wedges to provide a reference for the elevation of the screed, reducing the reliance on operator skill.

VÖGELE pavers with fully hydrostatic drives appeared in the 1970s. In 1977, the company debuted its first extending screed, which used an infinitely variable telescopic tube to adjust paving width. The manufacturer started to test high-compaction screeds in 1981 after acquiring the rights to the “Knäble” patent for a pulsed-flow hydraulics system. 1985’s SUPER 1800 SF was the company’s first spray paver, which could lay down a layer-bonding emulsion along with the pavement. In the summer of the same year, VÖGELE started to improve the precision and accuracy of its System for Automated Grade and Slope Control, including automatic control over the speed of the screed elevation.

A new diesel-electric drive system in the quiet SUPER 1800 DE paver (1995) won industry awards, using 50% less fuel and cutting emissions in half. VÖGELE’s flagship SUPER 2500 debuted the same year. Milling machine manufacturer Wirtgen acquired VÖGELE in 1996, laying the groundwork for the Wirtgen Group. An autonomous version of the SUPER 1800 DE called the RoadRobot introduced technologies that would later be developed into the Navitronic 3D grade/slope/navigation system (2000). In the final year of the millennium VÖGELE introduced its SUPER 1900 and SUPER 2100 pavers with digital control systems, along with the MT 1000, the first material feeder able to support continuous paving even on demanding jobs.

As the 21st Century got underway, VÖGELE created the Dash 1 (2003) and Dash 2 (2007) paver families, which among other things shared standardized wear parts and were more ecologically friendly. Control systems such as V-Tronic, Niveltronic Plus, Navitronic Plus, and the ErgoPlus design concept made the company’s pavers more automated and easier to operate. VÖGELE addressed the needs of the North American and Australian paving markets with its VISION line in 2008. That was also the year the company introduced its “hot to hot” InLine Pave method, which uses three machines, one behind the other, to lay down binder and surface courses in one pass. VÖGELE says InLine Pave yielded compaction values of over 98% even without roller compactors.

In 2010, VÖGELE brought its new €100 million, 646,000-square-foot (60,000-square-meter) factory in Ludwigshafen online, increasing its production capacity four-fold. The high-volume SUPER 3000-2 large paver with a width of up to 52.5 ft (16 m) also appeared that year. The economical, compact Dash 3 line surfaced in 2013, and the company made pavers for the Indian market in 2016 and the Chinese market in 2018. In 2016, VÖGELE debuted its RoadScan non-contact infrared temperature sensor. The following year, the Wirtgen Group was acquired by John Deere, and VÖGELE introduced its WITOS Paving optimization system (more on that below). The new, height-adjustable SUPER 3000-3i (2019) extended paving widths to a whopping 59 ft, 1 in (18 m).

Products

VÖGELE’s family of pavers covers the entire gamut of roadbuilding needs, from Mini Class units with a pave width of 1 ft 8 in (0.5 m) all the way up to 59-ft, 1-in (18-m) Highway Class machines. The firm’s Classic Line models use the ErgoBasic operating concept, while its more technologically advanced Premium Line products have ErgoPlus 3 controls. Its SprayJet spray pavers and InLine Pave units are sold as Special Class models.

VÖGELE’s screeds include extending models with paving widths ranging from 1 ft, 8 in (0.5 m) to 31 ft, 2 in (9.5 m), as well as fixed-width screeds that support hydraulic bolt-on extensions which enable widths of 9 ft, 10 in (3 m) up to 59 ft, 1 in (18 m). The screeds come with vibrators, tamper bars, and/or one or two pressure bars for various levels of compaction.

Finally, VÖGELE’s PowerFeeder material transfer vehicles come in Standard and Offset variations and can sustain uninterrupted paving.

Technology

One of the newer VÖGELE technologies that has the potential to make roadbuilding much more efficient is WITOS Paving Plus. Using telematics, wireless networking, and apps, the system documents project data and helps to identify ways to improve on efficiency. WITOS Paving Plus provides engineers, site managers, mixing plant supervisors, truck drivers, and paver operators with real-time oversight and data analysis from the planning stage through the end of the project.

Find The Right VÖGELE Equipment

There’s a fantastic selection of new and used VÖGELE pavers for sale at PavingEquipment.com, along with MTVs made by the company. Popular models include the SUPER 1303-3i, SUPER 1800-2, SUPER 1803-3i, and SUPER 1803-2.