Producers who have never had a fleet chipped by an outside crew usually have the same three questions, and none of them are about chipping. How long is my truck off the board. What do I have to provide. And what does the pad look like when you leave.
This is the whole sequence, from the first phone call to the truck going back in service, so you can plan around it instead of guessing.
Before the visit
The scoping conversation
The first call is not a price quote, it is a set of questions: how many trucks, what are they running, how long since the last chipping, what does washout discipline look like, and what does your dispatch board allow. Those answers decide the scope and the schedule, and a vendor who quotes before asking them is quoting a guess.
If nobody has looked inside the drums in a year or more, expect the scope to be larger than you think. That is normal, and it is why the first visit is priced differently from the ones after it.
The quote
Pricing is per fleet, built from truck count, buildup level, and location. What gets quoted is what gets paid. If a crew opens a drum and finds something materially different from what was described, the right behavior is a phone call before any additional work, not a surprise on the invoice.
Scheduling around your board
This is the part producers care about most and it is the easiest to solve. Crews work nights and weekends as a matter of course, because that is when trucks are actually available. The constraint we schedule to is your pour calendar, not ours.
Practically, you give us a window and a staging plan: which units, in what order, and where they will be parked. Two or three trucks staged at a time keeps the crew working continuously without taking your whole fleet out of rotation.
What you provide
Less than most people expect. A gate that opens, space on the pad for the trucks and the crew's compressor, and a contact who is reachable. Crews bring their own compressors, chipping hammers, air, lighting, PPE, and supplied air systems. If you have plant power and it is convenient, fine; if not, the crew is self sufficient.
Two things on your side do matter. Trucks should arrive empty and washed out as well as your normal routine allows, because a crew should be removing cured buildup rather than fresh residue. And somebody should tell the batch plant and anyone who might move a staged truck that the unit is out of service, in writing.
On the day
Arrival and walkthrough
The crew checks in, confirms the unit list, and walks the staging area. The lead looks inside each drum before starting so the scope matches what was quoted, and so the order of work can be set by condition rather than by parking position.
Lockout and isolation
Before anyone enters a drum, the truck is shut down and isolated so the drum cannot be rotated while a person is inside it. This is not negotiable and it is not fast. If a crew skips this step on your property, that is the moment to stop the job.
Confined space setup
A mixer drum is a permit required confined space under OSHA 29 CFR 1910.146: limited entry and exit, not designed for continuous occupancy, with a hazardous atmosphere potential. The setup reflects that.
The atmosphere is tested before entry. Under the standard, a hazardous atmosphere includes oxygen below 19.5 percent or above 23.5 percent, so those readings are a stop rather than a judgment call. The entrant goes in on supplied air with a harness and retrieval rigging. An attendant stays at the opening and does nothing else, because the standard specifically prohibits an attendant from taking on duties that interfere with monitoring and protecting entrants. The entry is documented on a permit.
From your side this looks like setup time before any hammering starts, and that is what you are paying for as much as the chipping itself.
The chipping sequence
Interior first, because that is where the payload is. The entrant works the drum shell with a pneumatic hammer, taking cured material off in sheets down to bare steel.
Then the fins, which is the part that matters for how the truck performs. Fins are what move material through a drum, and buildup bridged between them is what slows discharge and hurts mixing. A drum that was chipped on the shell but not properly between the fins will look clean and still behave badly.
Then the charging hopper and the discharge chute, where drivers lose minutes on every job. Then the frame, the catwalk, and the fender area where washout has been running down and hardening for months.
What it sounds like, and how long
It is loud, it is dusty, and it runs for hours. A drum with moderate buildup is one crew, one shift or less. A drum that has gone eighteen months untouched can take longer, and you should be told that when the lead first looks inside rather than when the shift ends.
If your pad is near a residential boundary, say so during scheduling. It changes which hours work.
Cleanup
The debris that came out of the drum is the crew's to handle, piled and removed, and the pad left the way it was found. A truck that goes back on the board after a chipping should be ready to load, not ready to be swept out by your yard man. If cleanup is quoted as an extra, that tells you something about the vendor.
After the visit
Documentation per truck
Every unit should come back with a record: what was found, what was done, and anything noticed that is not a chipping issue. Crews spend hours inside drums and see fin wear, cracks, worn rollers, and chute damage that nobody else is positioned to see. That observation is worth as much as the chipping on some trucks.
Weigh the empties
Do this. Run each freshly chipped truck across the scale empty and record the tare against the unit number. That is your clean baseline, and without it you are permanently guessing about buildup from here on. Weighing the same trucks periodically afterward turns the chipping interval into a measurement instead of an argument. What concrete buildup costs you per load walks through what to do with those numbers.
Setting the cadence
The first visit is the catch up. The recurring visits are the actual product, and they are smaller, faster, and cheaper because the drum never gets back to where it started. The interval gets set from what came out of your trucks rather than from a brochure, and adjusted as routes, mix designs, and fleet size change. How often a ready mix drum should be chipped covers how that interval is derived.
A fleet on a schedule never pays the catch up price twice. That is the entire argument for a cadence, and it is why the second visit is the one that tells you whether a vendor was worth hiring.
What should make you stop a job
Three things. A crew entering a drum without isolating the truck. An attendant at the opening who is also doing something else, which under the standard means there is no attendant. And no gas monitor, or one nobody can produce a calibration record for, which means the atmospheric readings mean nothing.
These are not fussy details. They are the difference between a confined space program and two people with a hammer.
For how the work itself is scoped, see concrete truck chipping and Safety. To get your fleet scoped and quoted, call (562) 789-8058 or send a service request.