RY10 Elite Crackfill Melter Applicator

Judson Burdon:
How's it going everybody? I hope everybody's amazing. Judd Burdon here from Asphalt Kingdom and I have the one and only, a man who I tremendously, tremendously respect. Known him a very long time. We've worked together and I'm really, really excited to be bringing Mr. Leigh Kuhn the president of RynoWorx on our livestream today to talk about something absolutely exciting.

Leigh Kuhn:
Thanks for having me, brother.

Judson Burdon:
It's really exciting to have you on here. I know how important this video is going to be for a lot of people and not just the video but also I think actually for people to understand truly, truly why you continue to innovate and be super creative and being able to solve problems. And we'll get into all of that.

Judson Burdon:
Leigh, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about yourself and where you come from, your background and then where things are going today.

Leigh Kuhn:
Yeah, sure. I think a few guys know my story but for guys that don't I'll bring it up to speed in as short of a timeframe as I can.

So, I'm a third generation asphalt guy. I'm the first generation that said, "Screw it," to the trade and said, "I'm going to build stuff and sell it to guys that do it instead of actually continuing to do it as a career."

So, my grandfather was a career paver. My dad followed the same footsteps and then from the time I was a teenager I spent a lot of time on my dad's crew in working from my first job up until I was around 17. Then I argued with him like hell and told him I could do a better job than what he could do and ended up going on my own and that's when I started doing sealcoating.

So, I started that from the time I could drive, by the time I was 17. By the time I was 18 we were producing anywhere from 30 to 40 residential driveway sealcoat jobs a day. Kind of figured out how to mass produce what my old man never did. And got a lot of sunburns. I'm pale so I burn. I'm basically translucent so sun and me are not friends. But yeah, that's my starting point.

During that time I was exposed to a variety of different pieces of equipment. I'm not going to say that I became an expert on running any one thing but that was my exposure. That's what brought me on to different types of asphalt maintenance and different techniques and made realize just how much of this industry is just a massive ... There's no real good solutions for everything. It's very much a glue and duct tape industry. Whatever solution you can figure out on the fly is what's got to work for that day if something breaks.

Yeah, so that's sort of my backstory with asphalt. I left asphalt for 10 years to get involved with my import company and in that business I met a lot of different manufacturers. I have a parts business for anyone that doesn't know my side piece that is roughly 25 million a year. It's the big brother to RynoWorx. Not as passionate about the parts business as I am about RynoWorx but it's what pays the bills.

Yeah, anyways, that parts business, I got introduced to literally about 50 different vendors over the course of the last decade. Really skilled vendors. Some in Canada, some in the US and many in Asia, which has had a bad rap lately. Yeah, that's given me the capacity to really find partners to mass produce product.

RynoWorx is an engineering and design and sourcing and distribution company. So, we do do assembly but a lot of our welding, our general fab, that is outsourced to a combination of Canadian suppliers as well as American and Asian suppliers and we bring the final product together. Everything, the final delivery, the final assembly, all those pieces are an in house part.

So, that's basically my story in a nutshell and it continues to evolve. Obviously I'm learning and I guess the one thing I would say with RynoWorx that really excites me it's the business that I get to come into every day and it's really fun to solve problems and look at the feedback that we get. Not all of it's rosy but listen to the genuine feedback that comes back and then try to formulate real solutions that solve people's problems.

The first melter that we released was the first melter with an internal burner. I kind of look at our new Elite that we're about to launch and it's like going from an iPhone 1 to an iPhone 12. We've baked in every ounce of feedback that we practically could over the last five years of listening and we've had a chance to architect something really cool.

Judson Burdon:
So, what I'm hearing here, I'm hearing a lot about solving problems. In life, we're always presented with adversity and challenges and there's things that ultimately make there challenge seem more efficient, more effective in being able to be extremely productive. Obviously, we're very limited on the amount of time that we have in life. So, when you say solve problems, can you give us maybe a sub list of what solving problems means to you?

Leigh Kuhn:
Yeah, I think it's about improving the life experiences for everyone that supports our business and uses our equipment. So, a simplified example is being on a job site and not having the right tool to do a job. Everyone can relate to that. It's like having to drive midway and get a screwdriver because you're missing it.

So, part of it is it's enhancing the overall experience for the guys that use our equipment in the field and trying to think about actual problems that everyone faces and look at practical solutions for those problems. What can we do to save time? What can we do, whether it's melting product faster, whether it's looking at enhancing the features on a machine to make it easier.

Because everyone knows when you go from an owner operated business, where you're the only guy on the crew. Well, you're also the smartest guy on the crew, typically. When you scale and you've got 10, 15, 20 guys, you don't have a good training platform in place, unless something's intuitive that can create a lot of problems. So, things like that.

Safety's obviously a big one for us. Trying to design products that are safe, that are simple and that ultimately are productive. That's sort of been are thing and it's what continues to drive us. Safety, reliability, productivity and ease of use. Those are the four pillars of RynoWorx. Everything we think about from a design perspective and when we're creating things follows that same question, same line of questions.

Judson Burdon:
And these are not being created because you feel or think that they need to be created. You always do your best to innovate and create but at the same time, the feedback that comes from the actual users, I know that you take the heart. I can see you on social media and you and I communicating on social media with other customers who might have dealt with challenges, right?

And I think listening is such an important thing in this business and there hasn't been a whole lot of listening and I've certainly seen you, like this product that we're about to showcase right now is it's first ... Literally, coming up right here. This build up has been an evolution, right? There's been an evolution that's taken place really from where things used to be years and years ago and for such a long period of time they were so plateaued where there was no more innovation. There was no more creativity taking place.

There was the torch fired melter. The torch blew in horizontally. Obviously from a logical standpoint a horizontal heating flame's never going to heat as well as a vertical flame. Everything that was always happening was those torch melters were blowing out all the time any time you got into somewhat windy conditions, which not only was a productivity issue because of the time wasted in having an extinguished flame, getting down on your hands and knees, putting the torch back in but also safety issue on back flash.

So, I remember back when it used to be the "MK10" way back when and that machine did a good job for a very long period of time but people kept complaining about these same things over and over.

So, congratulations on being the one in the company who has ultimately listened to what the contractors were saying and this hasn't been an easy journey but finally things are getting to the point now where through this evolution the best, most productive push melter applicator is literally being introduced right now. I know this very well and for a fact, a tremendous amount of engineering has gone into this based upon the listening that's been done with the contractor. This is not something that was fabricated in a garage and welded together. It's way beyond that.

So, can you give a little bit of insight and information about your team there and what it takes to actually build the machine?

Leigh Kuhn:
Yeah. So, for the Elite, this has been around, I'm going to say, honestly since the launch of the first RY10 Pro in 2015. When we first launched that burner design we started hearing feedback and we got feedback from customers at the show that had things they wanted to see. We've had feedback from customers and real user experiences.

Many of the guys that are watching this stream right now or are going to watch it, you guys have shared feedback and none of that ... We are not a company that wastes that. Every one of the comments, I deeply value when people share their experiences, whether they're negative or positive. Honestly the negative ones are worth more than the positive ones.

Yeah, we listened to that and what we were hearing was a lot of different things. We were hearing from guys that the original version needed to hold more crack fill. Obviously you have different size crack fill blocks. You've got 25 and 30 pounders and we listened to that. That was one of the main things. We optimized the kettle size internally to handle two full 60 pound blocks.

We listened on the heat loss. A lot of guys talked about one of the biggest things in a direct fire melter is controlling how you utilize the heat from a burner, right? It determines how much is needed to melt it. It determines how hot you have to have it to be able to get a good melting effect. How much material is lost out of the lid or out of venting. That's another area that we worked on.

We spent a lot of time listening on ergonomics and we spent a lot of time changing those pieces. So, before I go into this I guess I should ask. Do you want to go for a deep dive into all this because we're going to go down a rabbit hole.

Judson Burdon:
Well, I definitely tell you we could be on here for a very, very long time talking about this stuff. But I know everybody's sitting there going, "Show me the meat. Show me the meat." And everybody, you're literally about to see the RY10 Elite, which is the meat. So, you've got a machine here.

Everyone, let me tell you this. I've been a part of discussions with Leigh in bringing this product to fruition as well and I can tell you that from my standpoint, people who are on this stream who know us at Asphalt Kingdom, our goal is to push out something that's quality that's going to impact your business positively and Leigh and I have gone back and forth on this machine to really deliver, not only a quality machine, but also get it a price point that makes a lot of sense from an investment perspective.

So, Leigh, I know there's a Ryno that's blowing smoke right there and he's scuffing at the ground. Why don't you go over and show everybody the RY10 Elite?

Leigh Kuhn:
Sounds good. That sounds good. Let me know if you got a good visual here, Judd.

Judson Burdon:
Fantastic.

Leigh Kuhn:
Maybe we'll start with the main kettle. So, as I was mentioning and I started going down and maybe I'll go from this route. You're going to see from my phone that the kettle's got a forward lean to it. That's actually on purpose.

So, the first thing about this kettle is you're going to notice if you're comparing to an existing RynoWorx machine is it's quite a bit larger. So, we've increased the capacity by almost 30% and as I was starting to mention, we've optimized it to handle two 30 pound bricks, so 60 pounds loaded from empty. Although, it'll hold more than that once it's melted.

The other thing you're going to notice about the kettle is we've added a front latch onto the front of it for locking. The lid is folded under so that it actually makes a nice seal on the lower part of the kettle and that's nice because ultimately the heat loss in this kettle is significantly less. You have basically all three sides of the kettle mating down and you have a tiny slot for the agitator that's right here, which is really, really awesome.

Then, also for heat loss. You'll notice the RynoWorx logo, which I think you can see here. It's got this cool honeycomb that actually holds the logo together. There was two purposes for this. One, it looks really cool but two, it actually reduces the heat loss out of our side vents by almost 75%. So, it basically increases the heating efficiency of the burner.

So, another thing you're going to notice here is the valve and this is probably the most valuable function that we've changed and definitely my pride and joy. So, traditional valves, if you guys are looking at an old RY10 valve or even an MA10 valve, the valve is on the outside of the kettle.

So, Judd, I think you've probably got some experience with this. The challenge with the valve itself being outside of the kettle is crack fill normally will dry or will cool off inside the valve and you need to flash that with a torch to reheat it. With this, we call this the RynoValve and with the RynoValve-

Judson Burdon:
I got to interrupt you and I'll tell you why I got to interrupt you. That problem right there, anybody who's ever pushed a push melter in the history of push melters, that valve is a constant issue. The crack filler comes back to ambient temperature and it always is an issue to get going to be able to have that crack filler flow into the cracks.

I had to interrupt you because that's something I really want everybody to pay attention to on this livestream. Go ahead, Leigh.

Leigh Kuhn:
So, I'm going to talk about how this valve works. So, we're going to go inside the kettle and I don't know how good this is going to show up because it is admittedly dark in there so bear with me for one sec, guys.

Are you able to see the valve at the bottom of this opening and closing?

Judson Burdon:
Yes.

Leigh Kuhn:
So, the valve for RynoWorx keeps hot material inside the kettle and when you open the valve it allows hot material to flow. When you close it all of the hot material drains out of the valve. So, you're never holding any sort of cold material inside the actual valve. What this means is when you go to start up your machine from cold your valve is ready to use almost immediately and does not require any preheating. So, that's a huge benefit.

Leigh Kuhn:
Another huge benefit of the valve is serviceability. So everyone knows that from time to time you've got to clean your valve. They're going to get plugged up. Well, this valve as you can see here as four lag bolts. It's as simple as removing those four lag bolts and that entire assembly slides right out. So, your valve itself is made up of a main housing and a pin and simply remove those four bolts, take off your control arm and you can actually pull that pin out. You can dip this entire mechanism in a solvent, like some sort of a mineral spirits or a cutter and you can actually clean that valve solidly using a brush and some mineral spirits and load it back on and it'll be as good as new within 15, 20 minutes of servicing it.

So, that's a huge benefit because the old valves, they're not easy to clean, you can't easily remove the mechanism, there's no good way of ... The preheat time is longer.

Leigh Kuhn:
And I guess the last benefit of this is because of the nature of this valve you can see on the inside it's kind of like a car engine valve. So, it's got a 45 degree angle. It locks very tight. So, there's virtually no leaking. Comparatively to the old valves, using water we get literally tiny dribbles the size of a nickel or a dime over a period of 15, 20 minutes. Using crack fill, it's pretty well entirely eliminated. So, that's another huge benefit of the valve.

So, I want to talk a little bit more here and then continue going. Another thing we did is the bander on the lower part of the machine. That bander is little bit narrower. So we'll go two and three quarters of an inch. We did that to be able to save a little bit of materials so you're not wasting material and we still have that secondary drip guard mechanism in the event that there is a little bit of residual crack fill.

One of the nice things about the shoe is it is now fully bidirectional. You can spread crack fill forward and backwards. So, if you get to the end of a crack and you have a little bit of leftover you can pull it back over the crack until it's completely gone and that way when you're transitioning from one crack to a new one you're not dragging drippy, crappy material from one to next.

Another cool feature we added. So on the front you're going to see these funny looking RynoLifts. These are actually machined aluminum handles and the reason we put those on there is because when you're lifting on to a pick up truck it's normally a two man lift. Guys didn't have anything to grab this thing by. With these handles, solid aluminum it's meant that one guy can lift the handles, the other guy can lift the handle bars and you can easily load this onto a taller trailer or a pickup truck a lot easier than not having them at all.

There's a lid latch on the front, which is what I think I talked about earlier and now we're going to move around to some more fun discussion points here. So, the handlebars have been fully redesigned. You can see that they're no longer tube steel. They're actually these cool bent pieces of sheet metal that lap with each other. The reason we did that is we added a slot at the bottom of the kettle here and what this allows for is this bar height, the distance from the handlebars to the ground. On our old kettles we had a lot of feedback of people talking about how they either liked it or they didn't like how high they were. We've been able to not have to compromise and give way to both.

So, our handlebars are now adjustable from the same height as an MA10, which is around 34 inches off the ground to bar height or they can go up to 42 inches, which is the same as the existing RynoWorx RY10 bar height. So, the nice thing is, guys, regardless of your height, we got you covered. Whether you want something shorter, whether you want something taller, you can adjust this.

Along with the handlebar adjustments, these control rod lengths also adjust as do the agitation length. So, if you are putting the bar height down you can adjust your control rod lengths as well.

Another nice feature we added, so one of the big complaints we heard was fatigue from pulling this ... Can you guys see this spring right here on the control arm?

So, one of the big things we've heard from guys is one, the distance of this control rod and second, how much tension it takes to pull that string. Well, the good news is, the new valve that we designed requires less than one third of the spring tension of the old valve. That wasn't on purpose. That just happened to be a benefit and as a result of that, you automatically need way less pull and way less spring tension, which is going to reduce fatigue.

But the other things we've done to be able to add complete flexibility. Can you see this bar right here where I'm pulling it up? Can you see those pinholes?

We've made the spring tension adjustable. So, you can actually slide that pin up or down. If you're the type of person that wants a lot of tension because you're using a thicker material or you like the security of ensuring the valve shuts with force you can actually adjust that tension. So, you can make it stronger or lighter according to whatever you feel like you need and at the same time-

At the same time you can also adjust the actually pull length of this bar so that if you've got basketball player size hands you can leave it longer. If you're like me and everybody else and you've got regular size ones you might want to have the pull a little bit shorter and you can easily adjust that at the center of the bar.

So, coming around to my favorite feature of our machine. The RY10 Elite dash. All right, so the dash is comprised of our starter button, the igniter and then a nice machine bezel digital thermometer that sits in the front. So, why did we do this? If you look back at the bars in general, the idea was to have all of the controls for the machine right at the users fingertips, whether it be agitator, whether it be the ability to monitor temperature, ignite the burner, control the flow valve, control the shoe or push the machine forward. The goal was to have everything there. The dash is sort of at the center of that.

So, if everyone here assuming has owned an MA10 or an RY10 in the past, the thermometers used to be mounted right here on the kettle. We still do have a thermometer mount there but now it's simply a probe and the benefit for elite users is one, you don't have a glass thermometer if you're buying the elite. You just have the digital thermometer. One, it's way more reliable. Battery life on this thermometer, you could leave it on for six months and you still wouldn't kill battery. So, for guys that are worried about that, that's not a problem. But mainly it's reliability.

All these sensitive controls, a thermometer is a sensitive instrument, the igniter and the starter buttons, those are also sensitive. The thermal couple is right underneath this panel, another sensitive instrument. They're all well protected within the comfort of the handlebars and they're right at everyone's fingertips. So, that's really the critical piece.

When we move down here, you can see that there's a single conduit line that goes right into the burner assembly. The burner tray has been optimized. We're using the same reliable cast iron high pressure burner that's on the existing RY10 Pro but we've done is we've moved all the sensitive controls right up here into this panel.

So, as far as ... If anyone has owned an RY10 Pro then they can relate to having the burner on the front of the machine and having the propane lines go along the front. We wanted to bring everything to the back because it was so much better protected and it was within operator's sight. So, we've really removed a lot of the sensitive components on this machine to areas that are very hard to damage and also within the operator's sight.

Judson Burdon:
We have Dom Manzo who's on. Dom is a customer of ours and he's asking a question here. Is the digital display waterproof?

Leigh Kuhn:
Yeah, so the digital display is fully waterproof. If I unthread this piece here I'll show you. You can see that there's actually ... Guys bear with me. This thermometer is a prototype but you can see right here there's a rubber gasket that surrounds it. And this housing goes in. I don't know if you can see it but you see that round housing? That's a sealed plastic housing with rubber grommets. All the electronics in there are fully protected.

What I was going to say, guys, is the other component that's nice about this is what I just showed down here with this machined aluminum bezel. For changing the battery, all you do is unscrew that. That housing pops out and you got a single double A battery that goes in the back.

As I said, a battery change on this should be annually or every second year. It's not a common thing and it is fully waterproof.

Judson Burdon:
Right. And we've got Alex Lucic on here too over at Black and Yellow. He's on right now too. He says it looks pretty great. So, let's keep going through these things. Thanks, Alex, for joining us on this livestream. Please feel free to share it out on your Instagram page too.

Leigh Kuhn:
Sure. One thing I forgot to mention guys on the kettle is by having the lid open towards the back, it used to open to the side, by having it open to the back we've actually allowed for three way filling. So, if you're filling this thing from a trailer, it doesn't matter whether you pull up from the left side, right side or to the front. You're going to be able to fill the machine from three sides. All current MAs, including ours and Gingways, before this, they're all two sided fills, it's because the kettle lids always open towards the side.

Judson Burdon:
That's a very interesting thing, right? Think about that for a second. If you pull your machine to a truck or trailer and you're filling it from a 30 gallon kettle, you really want to be able to access your RY10 Elite from any angle just so it's quick and easy. Right up to the front, boom, fill it, from the side, fill it. Depends where your truck's parked, et cetera.

Just quickly, Alex is asking this question. I just want to jump in quickly because Alex has a really good question. So, he says, "One of the things that my guys are always talking about is being able to have the valve open without holding the lever down. Does this have this feature? Sorry if missed it earlier."

So, I'll just go ahead and answer it. So, what I'm understanding, Leigh, from your presentation earlier is that you can adjust the tension in which you're pulling that lever by adjusting the adjustable spring load, right?

Leigh Kuhn:
Yeah, so although there's no permanent open option, you can adjust the spring or remove the spring entirely and have zero tension. If you want to use your own ... If you want to take the spring off it's a two second job to do it and then literally you're using your own force to open and close it. It will stay open if you do that. So, you can go to zero resistance if you choose to. We set it up for minimal resistance, which means literally the fatigue is ... If on minimal setting you can barely feel it. It's less than 30% of a traditional MA for closing power. So, I hope that answers the question. You could do that if you want to but default setting on this is going to be way less.

Judson Burdon:
Great. Thank you so much.

Yeah, so I guess a couple other notables and we'll get on. We've added a torch holding bracket on the side here. In one feature that ... So, basically this is still a pre-production model, guys, so bear with me on this detail. But in final production there's some minor adjustments we have to make to the control arm here for the agitator. But yeah, the torch will basically mount to the side like you're seeing here.

We have a hose management system for the torch hose so it keeps your hose nice and neatly coiled, out of the way, not dragging and tied to the inside of the handle bars. So, that's another nice feature. You don't have a jumbled mess of hoses to worry about. That hose management's a really cool little add on.

I guess the other thing I would note is we've optimized the distance of the propane cylinder from the kettle. So, you'll notice there's a good size air gap there now to allow for more heat dissipation. We never had any issues with the RY10 but a lot of guys just mentioned that they wanted to see a greater gap and more space between the kettle and the unit. So, we did do that.

And you'll also notice, we added a heavy duty ratchet strap. So, that's a two ton strap. That's sized for the tank. This one's orange. The production one is actually black with the RynoWorx logo on it. So, it adds a little bit of a bling to it. But what you'll see is this tank is rock solid. It doesn't matter if ... You can trust going down the road that this thing's latched in place. It's not going anywhere. You don't have to worry about it vibrating lose. I know that our old unit used chains and this ratchet strap feature will be making it's way to all RynoWorx products in the future. The Elite's just the first one that we happened to get the design on.

So, that's sort of the core of it. Obviously, there's a lot more uninteresting stuff I could tell you guys from an engineering perspective that we did. Just general optimization, sizing and the shape and stuff. But that in a nutshell gives you most of what we've done to date and we're pretty excited about being able to bring this to market.

Judson Burdon:
I can say this and I'll say it in an unbiased way. This is the most advanced push melter on the planet. There's absolutely no doubt about it. Side to side with any other melter in the market, this is the machine. This was specifically designed for contractors that are looking to use push melters at their highest level.

There's a question that's popped in here and it's a great question because I know a lot of people ask this to us through asphaltkingdom.com. Erin, is asking, can this stay going while driving from job to job?

Leigh Kuhn:
So, I can't legally tell you guys yes because my insurance company might have an issue if I implied that it could and that you should but theoretically yeah, it is possible. With the optimization we've made to this thing it's pretty well bullet proof. I am in no way advocating that you drive down the road with hot rubber in a machine. That would not be a safe thing to do.

Judson Burdon:
This is similar to the RY30 Pro, the dual burner enclosed. Let's just say that I know some people on this thread right now that do do it. Again, we're not endorsing that or advising on that but there's the answer.

And Dom Manzo also on here too and he thinks it's an awesome job too, Leigh, so congrats, man. I know everybody's so excited.

So, just to cover out a few things. I have some notes here. So, just to summarize. This is the RY10 Elite manufactured by RynoWorx. Everybody can see the logo there and I know a lot of people are becoming more and more familiar with RynoWorx and making advancements in this industry. Not sitting still and stagnant but constantly taking that feedback and improving.

The main feature systems that we're seeing here that you covered. One is the sealed burner. Sealed burner prevents flameout on windy days. It's more safe. You're not experiencing back flashes, pumping raw propane into the machine, relighting and having those little explosions.

You've got the RynoDash. The RynoDash is electronic. It will show you the temperature in which the machine is operating at. You want to keep that between 350 and 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Is that correct?

Leigh Kuhn:
Yeah, whatever the manufacturer's spec is but typically in around the 380 to 400 range is most crack fills.

Judson Burdon:
Right. So, that other thing is on the RynoDash you have the prime button to be able to prime with propane and then you have your eclectic start. So, you no longer need to go around to your burner system, get down on your knees and have to figure out how to get that thing started from your knees.

Leigh Kuhn:
Correct. So, for the old RynoWorx RY10 Pro users and for the older design, the burner is in the front. So, you have to actually ignite it in the front and I think what we found is those controls essentially in it's new design, they're far better protected from being in an operator's site.

One other mentionable, Judd, on the burner is because of the heat loss improvements on the kettle, the heating efficiency on this one is actually better than the Pro. So, it's marginal when you factor a kettle size but it is a superior performance to the RY10 Pro and far superior to any torch model when it comes to fuel efficiency and when it comes to melting time.

Judson Burdon:
Completely. The RynoValve is manufactured from what exactly? What is the actual valve made of?

Leigh Kuhn:
Yeah, so that valve was expensive as all hell and hard to justify when you look at the cost of the old valves to product, which is basically just welded and cut steel. This valve is a solid piece of stainless. So, it's a cast piece of stainless steel. It's machined to precise tolerances and then the inner pin is also machined from a solid piece of stainless as well.

Leigh Kuhn:
So, that part was pricey but I think it's so worth it. It's such a cool feature. The fact that it can be removed clean, the fact that it virtually eliminates leaking entirely and the fact that preheating is no longer something you need to think about.

Judson Burdon:
Listen, I've used the RY10 Pros too and previous torch melters, right, and the issue is is that on the valve, the actual on and off close valve was further on the outside so it would come back to ambient temperature and you'd have to literally liquefy that stuff by putting a torch on it and it was a total pain. Whereas, the valve is actually flush with the kettle itself and then you have the valve that comes out off of it. So, the valve closes right up against the kettle, which means everybody, when you close that valve, all the hot crack filler leaks out. It's now an empty valve. When you go to reheat your machine inside it heats all that to liquid and it immediately has an opening in that valve because it's all been emptied after you used it the last time.

So, that valve, that RynoValve is a huge addition and will allow people to be way more productive. It's awesome.

Leigh Kuhn:
The other thing I didn't even mention is you have control on that valve adjustment over how open you want it to be. So, by adjusting your control arm positions if you find that you don't need a full stream because, let's be honest, for the most part we can't apply crack filler at full stream pace. Most of the times we're applying it it's going to be on a crack that's anywhere from even a one inch by one inch crack you can't go near full pace.

So, the nice thing is you can adjust the tension. You can adjust the length, the full length and you can have minimal effort and have optimal flow out of that valve.

Judson Burdon:
That's incredible. And as that crack filler flows under the valve into the rectangular shaped scraper that's on an adjustable arm, it will follow the contour of the asphalt but if you happen to go forward and you get a bit of a puddle and you notice you missed a spot or you came off the crack, you can literally drag your crack filler backwards now because of the shape of that shoe, right?

Leigh Kuhn:
Yeah, it's nice. You can actually run a puddle in the shoe. So, you can basically put access crack filler, run it to the end of the crack and if you end up with a little bit extra you can pull it back and that's nice because then you're not having to go back over during the job. You can run a little bit of excess, have a pool, continue to drain in and when you're getting to the end of the crack or you've reached the end, if you've got a little bit of excess, drag it backwards to make sure that all the excess is gone before you move on to the next crack.

Judson Burdon:
Right. The propane shelf too. There's now a gap between the kettle and the propane bottle so, that's nice to have that extra air. For safety, it's nice. Also, the Ryno handles that are on it. You call them the RynoLifts and the RynoLifts on the front of it, everybody can remember what it's like to lift a three wheel MA10 or a RynoWorx three wheeled unit or a RY10 Pro. Without those handles you've got to grab those caster wheels and I've grabbed it by the front and put it down in a truck bed or in a trailer and that caster wheel pinched my fingers.

Leigh Kuhn:
So, it's especially problematic when you've got 160 pound machine with a full propane bottle, add another 15, 20 pounds and then throw on 50 pounds of crack fill or 20 pounds of crack fill left in your hopper. That's not a light lift. So, those lifts are as comfortable as I think we could make lifts be relative to the next. I think we've done that. Yeah, posture wise, the guy that's lifting the very front of the unit, typically speaking when guys are loading these they're either using a ramp, in which this isn't a problem, or if they're loading it on a higher pick up truck or trailer it's a two man lift while one guy's standing in the bed and grabbing the tall handlebars so he doesn't break his back. But the guy on the ground floor needs to be able to get the machine up high enough to get it loaded on the truck and I think having those lifts nice and low allows you to get a good deadlift on.

It's like lifting a barbell off the ground and using your legs to get the height. So, it should be a lot more comfortable of a lift. Everyone knows it's not comfortable loading but these certainly are a lot better than having nothing to lift off of or having a little bar that goes across the kettle like what's on a lot of other melters.

Judson Burdon:
Right, for sure. Leigh, while we're on right now, I'm just letting you know we've had a lot of orders coming in right now during this stream that are coming in right now.

Judson Burdon:
So, everybody listen, thank you so much for tuning in today. If you have any questions at all feel free to post them on the comment thread here on the video. Definitely don't forget to check us out on Instagram, check us out on Facebook, check us out at YouTube, check us out everywhere and certainly know you can PM me, DM me, message me, email me anytime.

And, Leigh, thank you so much for working so hard, for listening and for creating something that I know is a game changer. Super exciting and I know that you'll be at the National Pavement Expo too coming in the end of January where this new machine will also be featured. So, really exciting, man. Thank you so much for taking the time today to share all this with everybody.

Leigh Kuhn:
Thanks for having me.

Judson Burdon: Pleasure. All right, everyone. Listen, you saw it. RY10 Elite. Contact me with any questions. Thanks for being on with both Leigh and I today. Take care.