History Cold milling

From milling contractor to world market leader

The perfectly engineered cold milling machines of today need mere minutes to load a 30-tonne truck with granulated asphalt material. It has been a long journey to get there, however, and WIRTGEN has been a key driver in enabling these advances to be made. In 1971, WIRTGEN built the first of a total of 100 hot milling machines for the contracting fleet it owned at that time. The technological leap from hot milling to cold milling was sparked, in 1979, by the use of carbide-tipped point-attack cutting tools that were commonly used in the mining industry.

From the very first cornerstone – developing the cold milling technology for road construction – to date, WIRTGEN has paved the road to success of this technology with numerous innovative milestones. Today, the WIRTGEN name is synonymous worldwide with high-performance cold milling technology.