A new bead monitoring system available from EZ-Liner Industries offers unprecedented control over bead application. This system, which is fully retrofittable to almost any truck-mounted striping machine, gives operators a constant readout, while striping, of glass bead usage as measured in pounds per gallon of marking material.
"This system is accurate to within the nearest pound of beads left in the tank, and it's accurate to within the last tenth of a second," explains Brad Te Grotenhuis, Senior Service Technician for longline stripers. "We've had it in the field for a full season now, and it's working even better than we expected."
Developed in response to upcoming retroreflectivity mandates, which call for controlled application of glass beads, the EZ-Liner monitoring system has found its way into state striping contract specifications for the 1997 season.
"We use a combination of hardware and software to sample the flow of beads every 10 milliseconds. This sampling is accurate to within a pound," explains General Manager Don Vermeer. "We can give you a simple system that measures usage, or an integrated set-up that ties into your paint guns and pumps to give you a constant readout in the cab in pounds per gallon of paint."
This is important because the old methods of averaging can result in errors of up to 100% in calculating bead application rates. Bead flow can vary by as much as 40% between full tank and an empty tank, so an average daily rate of application of six pounds per gallon could fluctuate between three and ten pounds per gallon of actual application.