It may be only around a couple of hundred kilometres from bustling Dubai and even fewer from Ras Al Khaimah city, but step onto the 36 kilometres of winding mountain road that leads from the sands of the northern emirate to the heights of the Al Hajar range and you will be forgiven for thinking you have set foot on a different planet.

And it is this other-worldly landscape that instantly tells you how challenging a task it must have been to lay down the smooth, culverted, cambered and perfectly graded slope-hugging road that snakes its way up the mountain. This was the task that was accomplished by Yaghoub Alipour Vaezi and his team from General Mechanic Company, the project’s contractors, fortified with an army of excavators fitted with FINE HYDRAULIC BREAKERS.

"This is 36km of some of the most challenging and difficult roadworks you can find," says Vaezi. "When we compare this road with regular roads and highways, you can see that our work here was tough.

"We started this project in 2005 with an initial time frame of three years for completion. But the estimation by the consultant was way off the mark. We also had to do some extra work, such as protection barriers, bracing walls, etc. So it took around eight years to build the road up to the point it already stands built until now."

A major challenge was the remoteness of the terrain, he adds. "Transporting all the necessary things for the project up to the site was difficult and costly. And if an equipment broke down on site, it was a completely different story compared to building something in a city. If you are in Dubai you can just go to the dealer and get what you want, but not here."

Proud achievement

Enter PROFEN and FINE BREAKERS. The projects in RAK and FUJ have utilized 9 FINE breakers of varying sizes, right from the small 350 kgs side type breaker FINE6BL, fitted on the loader backhoes, upto the 3500 kgs, Top bracket type FINE45 suitable for fitment on 45 ton class excavators. More importantly, PROFEN provided a tremendous level of back-up service to keep the breakers running in trying conditions.