Wheel Cold Planers For Sale

About Wheel Cold Planers

Wheel cold planers, or asphalt milling machines with wheels instead of tracks, are typically small to medium self-propelled machines. Like their tracked counterparts (see track cold planers) wheel road planers can grind down bumps and surface defects, as well as remove damaged sections for repair. They use a rotating drum or rotor studded with freely-rotating cutting tips (picks) to grind the surface of the pavement on a road, bridge, racetrack, runway, or parking lot.

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Wirtgen W 50 Ri Wheel Cold Planer

Advantages Of Wheels

Manufacturers such as Wirtgen and BOMAG outfit their smaller milling machines with wheels and their larger cold planers with tracks for a number of reasons. One is the fact that small wheel planers can be maneuverable enough to circle manhole covers, follow curving curbs, and mill around other obstacles that a larger tracked model would have to pass over with its drum raised. Wheels can also give a lightweight planer more traction by focusing its ground pressure into the contact patches of its tires, which have less area than tracks.

Finally, wheels are much less expensive to replace and maintain than tracks. They’re very durable, even on asphalt and concrete surfaces that can be rough on many types of machine tracks. Wheel axles are also simpler and easier to maintain than the rollers and drive wheels of a tracked undercarriage.

Disadvantages Of Wheels

On the other hand, wheeled milling machines aren’t ideal in every scenario. If the roadway has a soft shoulder or the surface will be milled thin, a cold planer with tracks might be recommended for its lower ground pressure, both for flotation and to avoid creating ruts. Also, despite traction control systems that reduce power to slipping wheels and increase power to tires with a good grip on the surface, a wheeled planer might not provide enough tractive force to be as efficient as tracks at high-capacity milling.

Find The Right Wheel Cold Planer For Your Operation

BOMAG, Caterpillar, Volvo, and Wirtgen are all major manufacturers of wheel milling machines. You’ll find plenty of new and used wheel cold planers for sale at PavingEquipment.com.