Cracks are unavoidable. In asphalt pavement, they are not a question of if, but when. Temperature swings, traffic loading, oxidation, and subgrade weakness or movement all conspire over time to pull a surface apart, one fracture at a time. What separates a pavement that survives from one that fails early is not whether cracks appear, but how quickly and how correctly they are addressed.
For contractors like DeHart Asphalt, crack sealing is not a secondary service or a filler between paving jobs. It is foundational work. It is preservation in its most direct form. And it is a discipline that demands precision, patience, and equipment that performs exactly as expected in the field.
This is especially true when the elements come together to work against you. Such was the case when I visited Robert Bonura and his family in Chandler, AZ, to get some hands on training with their custom blue Crafco machines. It figured that the first time I travel to the desert, it would pour rain while I'm there. Despite that, they still did a great job showing me the ropes, as they trained me in the two ways they deal with asphalt cracks: Crack filler and mastics.
The First Failure Point
The city of Phoenix, AZ, and the surrounding communities, like Scottsdale or Chandler, have seen a recent shift in the pavement maintenance industry landscape over the last couple of years. It looks a lot different now than it did back when DeHart first opened their doors. More and more of the local pavement contractors have sold to private equity firms, who roll up these business into a larger packaged asset, which they usually hold for a varying length of time, until it’s determined the asset has reached maturity, at which time it is sold off to someone else.
This process isn’t unique to Phoenix or even Arizona, no, it’s probably been happening in your area too. While not all private equity firms are created equal, nor do they all operate in the same manner, Bonura explained how it has changed the landscape for those who remain independent. Those who want to keep working for themselves are often forced into situations where they are working at extremely low margins, or risk being completely priced out of a market.
To push back against this trend, the DeHart Asphalt team hangs their hat on their ability to treat their long-time local customers with the sort of person-to-person touch that is harder for larger corporately controlled entities to maintain. While that’s not impossible, it helps when, like Bonura and his family, they are invested not only in the work itself but in the community – because it’s their community.
However, despite all this adversity, they get up each day and put their heart and soul into their work. I saw it first-hand as they gave me my first lessons in how to deal with asphalt cracking in all shapes and sizes. Because cracks do not just appear all at once, overnight. They begin as small hairlines, then widen with time and wear, and left untreated, they become pathways for water intrusion, accelerating base failure and eventually leading to potholes, rutting, and full-depth distress.
As we crouched over one of these cracks in a small lot connected to a nearby metro-park, Bonura explained to me, “Once water gets in there, you’re not fixing just the surface anymore. You’re fixing everything underneath it.”
As a tight-knit, family owned and operated crew, this reality is what has driven DeHart’s approaches pavement maintenance. For their customers, they are there to identify this type of damage early-on, and ensure that their customer’s assets remain protected from these types of intrusions. The first failure is only the beginning.
“It’s easy to look at a crack and think it’s minor,” Bonura said. “But we’ve all seen what happens when those get ignored for two or three seasons.”
The Process: Dealing With Adverse Conditions
One of the biggest lessons I learned from my time on the DeHart jobsite was that effective crack sealing is not simply a matter of pouring material into a void. That might seem obvious to the well acquainted with the process, and, while I assumed there was more involved, I was impressed with the level of detail they brought to it. It is a sequence of steps that must be executed consistently to ensure the material bonds fully and does its job.
Kristen Tetrault
Preparation comes first. Cracks must be cleaned thoroughly, removing debris, vegetation and moisture. Routing may be required depending on crack width and movement. Only then does material application begin. On the day I trained with them, we faced some additional challenges because of the deluge of rain all morning. However, this did allow me to see how the pros overcome these problems to help their customers even when the weather is against them.
This provided me with, perhaps, my favorite part of the whole trip, which was getting to bust out the Crafco Heat Lance. Usually, when I’m out learning a new part of the industry, I’m kind of the only one excited by these mundane activities for the contractors. But when the Heat Lance came out, Bonura’s father-in-law Leonard had the biggest smile on his face since in the high desert, there’s not often occasion to deploy it.
We targeted one of the longer cracks in the parking lot, less than an inch wide in most places, and I started going over it with the Heat Lance. It’s 2,500+ degree temps and 3,000 feet per second air speeds instantly turned the blacktop from a slick wet sheen, to the matte dry appearance we needed. When I assumed we’d start pouring in the crack filler, Bonura surprised me again.
“Right now, we only know for sure the outside of the crack is dry,” he said. “There could be wet dirt or plants down where we can’t see them. If we put down the crack fill now, it might just pull right off when we’re done.”
That’s when we broke out the Crack Vac, which he explained was additionally important since they have to abide by some strict dust suppression policies in their area. The Crack Vac, also from Crafco, is exactly what you imagine it is. A high pressure cleaning device that pushes in compressed air to loosen any debris, and combines it with a powerful vacuum head that collects the dislodged particulates.
Why Consistency In Heat Changes Everything
DeHart’s crew uses a Crafco Super Shot 125D with the flexible boom arm that keeps the material hose out the way and the weight off anyone’s shoulder. Bonura emphasized that temperature control is one of the most critical variables. Crack filler must be heated evenly, held within a narrow working range, and delivered to the crack at the correct viscosity.
“If that material isn’t at the right temperature, everything goes sideways,” Bonura explained. “Too cold and it won’t flow. Too hot and you’re burning it.”
Kristen Tetrault
This is where equipment performance becomes inseparable from workmanship. For crack sealing and mastic application, uneven heat is the enemy. Burnt material loses elasticity. Underheated material fails to bond. Either outcome compromises performance. Prior to prepping the crack, Bonura walked me through the process.
“Most mornings I start it up about an hour and a half before we are due on the jobsite,” he told me, pointing to the control panel. On this newer model, a lot of the warm-up process is automated, but knowing that Robert had decades of experience I was curious what the older models were like. “It used to be just an on-switch, you’d kick it on, wait for it to warm up a bit before turning on the pump because it would bind up – same with the agitator. You could blow it. We had a scenario where that happened. These new models are great because it’s all automated.”
Truthfully, those types of options are safety related features. They not only protect the machine, but they protect the user too. Once everything was heated up, and we’d cleaned the crack I got my first shot using the hose while the DeHart crew followed behind me with their squeegees. If you’d like to see how I did, scan the QR code in this article to watch the video!
Crack Sealant Versus Mastic
Anyone who’s walked a parking lot knows that not all cracks are created equal. Narrow, working cracks may be well served by traditional crack sealant. Wider, more distressed areas are often better addressed by mastic, which incorporates aggregate to provide additional structure and load resistance. DeHart uses both, selecting the treatment based on crack width, movement, and pavement condition.
“Mastic isn’t just sealant with rocks in it,” said Daniel Darling, Western District Manager for Crafco. “It behaves differently. It levels out. It distributes the load.”
Mastic application demands even greater control of material temperature and flow. Improper heating can lead to segregation or poor bonding. Equipment capable of maintaining stable temperatures throughout the system becomes essential. On the day I spent with them, we had a new piece of equipment to try out that I’ve been wanting to see in action. Representatives from Crafco came to the site and let us try out their new skid steer attachment, mastic applicator called the EZ Patcher.
Kristen Tetrault
Once we had it hooked up to the skid steer, from inside the cabin I could see exactly where the applicator was positioned, because it is equipped with a onboard camera. That helped me line it up with the crack we intended to repair, and made my life so much easier, because I am not the greatest or most experienced Skid Steer operator in the world.
After Leonard got to try it out first, I was excited to try it out for myself, but I had never seen mastics first-hand, and wasn’t sure what exactly makes the material all that different from crack filler. I knew it had aggregate in it, but it’s not hot mix asphalt with large stone, but something else entirely. It’s in its own category. It can be a bridge between permanent, long-term asphalt rehabilitation and emergency repair work.
While the aggregate provides a structural matrix, mastic retains its flexibility even after it has hardened. This allows it to expand and contract, moving with the bonded pavement, and preventing any further moisture intrusions.
From my seat in the cockpit of the skid steer, I could move forward slowly, make tiny adjustments, and ensure I was covering the large crack equally. Within just a few minutes after I finished, and climbed out of the cabin, the mastic I’d put down wasn’t even tacky when I touched it with the bottom of my shoe. It set up much quicker than I imagined it would at volume, especially given the higher than usual moisture in the air from the heavy morning rain storms.
Reflections In The Desert
My time with Robert Bonura, his family, and the entire DeHart Asphalt crew was short, but it had an outsized impact on me. A lot of contractors whom I visit are in a family business. That wasn’t new, but the way I watched them all interact with one another while doing the work was actually quite something to behold. When I had the crack seal wand in my hands, and I was trying my best to shoot the material where it was needed, they danced around me without a word.
Kristen Tetrault
I could tell that, while they work together every day, and, of course, no family is perfect, they enjoy doing it together. That togetherness came through in how they sharing with me how they do what they do, and how they do it consistently. Some of that is the tools they use, but it is also in how they carried themselves and how they put pride into their work.
The next day I had the chance to tour Crafco’s manufacturing facility where they build all their hardware. From sealcoat tanks to mastic melters and applicators, everything is welded, painted, tested, and validated before ever reaching a contractor’s yard.
“This is where we build all of our machines,” said Greg Frantz, the plant and engineer manager. “From start to finish, everything happens here.”
The facility is not an impersonal, automated assembly line. Instead, it reflects a deliberate, controlled manufacturing process. Approximately 450 to 500 machines are built each year, with each unit assembled, painted, tested, and run under load before shipment all across the world.
“We’re not building thousands of units,” Frantz said. “We’re building tens at a time, and that lets us control quality at every stage.”
Near the end of the tour we came to the work station for a mechanic named Chris whom, at the time, was just three months shy of celebrating twenty-six years at the company. He grew up nearby, was in the Marine Corps for thirteen years, and when I walked into the supply closet he had retrofitted into his “office” I told him that it smelled just like my grand-dad’s garage. I asked him what he would say the generation coming up these days into the world and workforce.
“Learn knew things,” he said, explaining how he found and then followed his passion. He didn’t know what it was right away, but he stayed open, and said yes to opportunities as they came to him.
“If you’re not happy where you’re at, or doing what you’re doing, those will be the stepping stones to get you where to want to be. To find your passion. But [sometimes] you got to do a lot of different things. Every day I get to wake up and do my passion.”
Kristen Tetrault
