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Wirtgen’s W 150 Fi compact milling machine enters the North American market

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Wirtgen Group used this year’s World of Asphalt and AGG1 Aggregate Academy & Expo for the North American debut of the Wirtgen Compact Milling Machine W 150 Fi, whichprovides higher milling performance with lower fuel consumption.

With a milling width of up to 1.8 metres, the W 150 Fi is designed for use on major construction projects with restricted space, such as inner-city locations.

“This has a 9L, 425 HP John Deere engine. Take that horse power … and the F-series features, which have already been proven on the large milling machines, the mill assist operating system, all those features and benefits, and now we put it into the compact size machines as well. So we’re bringing everything and kind of downsizing it a little bit for what we’re doing,“ explains Tom Chastain, with Wirtgen Group.

A key benefit of the W 150 Fi is the Mill Assist machine control system, which allows the operator, particularly less experienced operators, to get sustainable and efficient machine operations with high productivity.

“We’re letting the machine do a lot of the heavy lifting here,” Chastain explains. (We can) tell the machine ‘hey, this is the drum we have, these are the teeth we’re running’ … the machine will do the rest of it for you. So, we take that guesswork out of the operation.”

As well, the basic and variable versions Multiple Cutting System (or MCS) allow the use of different milling drums with working widths from 0.6 metres to a maximum of 1.8 metres for greater flexibility and higher machine utilization rates.

“What we can also do with this machine is drop that entire five-foot housing, we can actually put a six-foot cutter underneath this machine, which turns the 150 Fi into the most compact, versatile, half-lane milling machine on the market today, which no one else can do. We can turn this machine into a Swiss Army knife,” Chastain says.

Chastain notes the W 150 Fi also has Wirtgen’s Performance Tracker system, which uses a laser scanner to measure what is to be milled. Surface milling performance and milling volume are measured using GPS positioning and other sensors. This results in a more accurate calculation of the work completed on the project.

“At the end of the day, we can close out that job, what we get –– square yards, cube yards, square feet, fuel, water, cutting tool consumption –– we can even see how many tonnes we loaded into the trucks we loaded that day. We see idle time, wash down, all that valuable job data that we need.”