Specializing in residential, commercial, and industrial grading and paving, Bissen Asphalt has served Door County, Wisconsin since 1968. “My dad started up here in '68, and he retired in '04, and I started in '05 on my own,” says Rick Bissen, second-generation owner of Bissen Asphalt. “I've always enjoyed it. There are never two driveways or parking lots that are the same. It's always different — there's always a challenge.”
With grading jobs varying between residential driveways to large parking lots and municipal projects, Bissen needed a motor grader that was powerful enough to handle large jobs, but agile enough to get the work done in tighter spaces. Bissen worked with CASE dealer Miller-Bradford & Risberg and decided on a CASE 836C motor grader. “I was looking for a mid-size grader because the larger graders, the road style graders are too big for what we do,” Bissen explains. “And the small ones, they can't cut. They can't grade. They can't carry the material. I was looking for something in the mid-size range with a little more weight, and I do believe I found the perfect machine for it because it has been very awesome for us so far this year.”
“I also need to get in driveways with trees overhanging — if it's single lane, 10-foot pass, and with something like this, I could still get in those driveways.”
CASE C Series motor graders are available machine control-ready from the factory for all major suppliers of machine control technology. This allows the 836C to be deployed, straight from the dealer, into any fleet-wide precision or machine control solution a business owner may deploy. Bissen has outfitted his 836C motor grader with a 2D machine control solution from Leica Geosystems. “We didn't do it at first, but then I thought after the fact that when you're coming out at, even something as simple as a straight driveway that's 100-hundred feet long. You can run one side manually. You can set your degree of slope that you want on the driveway, and you can cover that slope in one pass [automatically], versus running manual.”
“I can guarantee you, it has saved us a tremendous amount of time on the job sites with this grader, versus what we had in the past.”
Kirk Wilke, an equipment operator with Bissen Asphalt, sees significant operational benefits and competitive advantages provided by the 2D Leica machine control system. “The Leica system controls our grade and slope, and it'll lock one side in, setting my grade at one percent, so I don't have to watch both sides of the moldboard, so way more comfort, not so much head movement,” he says. “I'm out within probably half the time, and your slopes are held way more true than running it by hand. It ups our production and keeps up with the pace of the new age.”
Motor graders are often considered one of the most difficult pieces of heavy equipment to learn and operate. Wilke has been in the cab for over ten years. “It takes patience,” he explains. “You can't really hurry, and you have to know your slopes and grades.”
Wilke is impressed with the capabilities of the 836C and sees several operational benefits over other machines he’s ran in the past. “The 836C is awesome — enough power, enough weight for the size of the machine we need.”
“The controls, the response time, the hydraulic levers respond, the weight, it's cutting through our humps and not riding over the top of them and lessens the time on the job.”