When crack sealing isn't enough

The range nobody had a material for

A traditional maintenance program has two tools. Seal the cracks, and when the pavement is too far gone, repave. The distance between those two, in both condition and cost, is enormous.

The Illinois Center for Transportation's field installation guidance, produced for an FHWA pooled fund study, puts the boundary in numbers: crack sealing suits widths of roughly 0.2 to 0.7 inches, crack filling up to about an inch, and for cracks wider than that it recommends other treatments, naming mastics specifically. It also rules sealant out on pavement already showing severe fatigue or block cracking.

So the boundary is not a marketing line. Past it, more sealant does not help: it sags, tracks out under traffic, or disappears into the void. What the damage needs is a material that fills width and depth rather than bridging across them, and that is a different product.

GAP Mastic, for width and area

GAP Mastic is a hot-applied material for wide cracks, open seams, shallow cupping and depressions, fatigue cracking, and small voids, the distresses that are too big to seal and nowhere near bad enough to repave.

It carries engineered aggregate in a heavily polymer-modified, thermoplastic binder, and the comparison that matters is not against other mastics. It is against what actually gets used on this damage: a hot mix asphalt patch, or a shovel of cold patch. Neither of those stretches.

That is the whole difference. A repair with no give in it, sitting in a crack that opens and closes every year, has nowhere to put that movement, so it debonds at its own edges and you are back to a crack, this time with a seam around it. A heavily polymerized binder stays flexible through the same cycling, so the repair moves with the pavement instead of fighting it, and inteliBond™ forms a thermal bond with the pavement around it that seals water out rather than relying on friction.

It is formulated to run into the crack and the voids beside it rather than bridging over them, which is what stops a repair from sitting on top of a problem it has not actually filled. Crews can work, smooth and adjust it before it sets.

A wide crack is almost always mastic work rather than patch work, and the reason is movement. A crack only gets that wide because it is moving a long way as the pavement expands and contracts through the year, so whatever goes in it has to stretch further than a patching material is built to. Mastic is the more flexible of the two. Patch is the one that carries load.

The formulation is aimed at maximum flexibility without giving up stability: a repair that moves with the pavement but still holds its shape under traffic rather than shoving, rutting or tracking.

GAP Patch, for where pavement is missing

A pothole is a different problem from a wide crack, and it asks for the opposite property. A wide crack needs a material that moves; a pothole needs one that carries. The pavement is no longer continuous, and something has to bear a wheel across the gap. Sealing a hole does not make it structural.

GAP Patch is a hot-applied patching material built for that: high-strength engineered aggregate suspended in a polymer-modified thermoplastic binder, placed hot so it bonds to the pavement around it rather than merely sitting in it.

That bond is what separates it from cold patch. Cold patch is compacted by traffic instead of by a crew and holds to the surrounding pavement only mechanically, so its edges work loose, water gets in behind it, and the hole reopens near where it was. A hot-applied patch that is bonded and cohesive does not ravel out in the first week.

The same reasoning covers the places where pavement meets something rigid and has settled away from it. A drain casting left standing proud is a drop every wheel finds, and an open edge for water on all four sides. Bringing the pavement back to grade around it is patching work, not sealing.