LeeBoy's PR900 Distributor and Rosco NB15 Broom: Building a Self-Sufficient Paving Crew

A paving crew's self-sufficiency usually gets measured by the paver and the roller — the two machines everybody sees laying and compacting the mat. Two quieter additions to LeeBoy's lineup change how self-sufficient that same crew can be on everything around the mat: the PR900 asphalt distributor for tack and prime coat, and the Rosco NB15 broom for surface prep and cleanup. Neither one is a paver. Both are the difference between a crew that owns its whole process and a crew that's still subcontracting or renting pieces of every job to someone else.

The PR900 Replaces Hand-Rate Guessing With an Actual Controller

LeeBoy has sold a compact tack distributor for years in the L150 — a 150-gallon unit built, in the company's own words, for "the paving contractor dedicated to smaller projects," running a 4.8-horsepower gas engine with no digital rate control mentioned in its spec sheet. The PR900 is a genuinely different machine, not a refresh of the L150: independent 600-gallon front and 300-gallon rear tanks for 900 gallons total, a Viking positive-displacement rotary gear pump, and a 7-inch Plus+1 CAN Bus touchscreen controller that holds up to 12 preset application rates, reads out gallons-per-minute and total gallons and square yards sprayed in real time, and uses a radar ground-speed sensor to hold application rate automatically as the truck's speed changes over a job. Viking's rotary gear pumps have decades of history in liquid-asphalt distribution specifically, not a pump borrowed from an unrelated industry, which matters for anyone who's dealt with a distributor pump that wasn't built for hot, viscous material.

What Six Times the Tank Actually Buys a Paving Crew

That jump matters for a specific reason: tack and prime coat application rate is one of the most consistently under-controlled variables on a paving job, and it's also one of the most consequential. Too little tack and the new mat delaminates from the surface underneath; too much and it bleeds through, weakens the bond, and creates a mess for the paving crew right behind the distributor. A 150-gallon skid-mount unit with no digital rate control is genuinely fine for driveway and small parking-lot work, where a contractor can eyeball a short pass. It runs out fast, and it depends entirely on operator judgment, on a highway resurfacing job, a municipal street program, or any bid where a DOT inspector is checking application rate against spec. The PR900's preset rates and automatic ground-speed compensation take that judgment call away from guesswork and put a documented, repeatable number behind it — the kind of consistency that matters when you're bidding against contractors who already have it.

The PR900 also ships with hand spray wands and dedicated tool storage as available options — a detail that matters more than it sounds on a real jobsite, where crews constantly need to hand-tack small utility cuts, manhole rings, and curb returns that the main spray bar can't reach cleanly. A distributor that only handles the wide, straight passes still leaves a crew improvising with a hand can and a paintbrush for the fiddly parts of the job; one built with wand access from the factory doesn't.

The Rosco NB15: A New Category for LeeBoy's Own Storefront

The NB15 broom is a different kind of new. LeeBoy hasn't previously sold a broom under its own catalog — the NB15 arrives through Rosco Manufacturing, a sibling brand sold through LeeBoy's dealer network, so there's no direct LeeBoy predecessor to compare it against, and it's worth saying so honestly rather than inventing one. What it is: a three-wheeled, self-propelled sweeper with an 8-foot, 24-inch-diameter wafer-poly brush core, a 25-horsepower Kubota D1105 engine, hydraulic down-pressure control, and a 30-degree sweep angle in either direction. It's easily towed between sites and light enough, at roughly 2,620 pounds dry, that it doesn't need a dedicated trailer the way a paver or roller does.

A broom this size isn't only a pre-paving prep tool. The same class of three-wheel sweeper works chip-seal jobs, post-milling cleanup ahead of an overlay, and general parking-lot and municipal-street maintenance contracts that have nothing to do with a paving crew's core mat-laying work at all. For a contractor who already owns a paver and roller but has been turning down sweeping-only maintenance contracts because there was no broom in the fleet to run them, the NB15 opens a genuine secondary revenue line rather than just supporting the paving side of the business — towable behind a pickup, self-propelled on site, and small enough that one operator runs it without a CDL-rated tow rig.

The NB15's 25-horsepower Kubota D1105 is also worth noting for the same reason a small Kubota diesel matters on a mini excavator: it's well under the horsepower threshold where Tier 4 Final compliance requires a DEF system, so there's no exhaust fluid to buy or a second tank to babysit on a machine that's already easy to maintain. For a paving crew that's already budgeting fuel and DEF for a paver and a roller, one more piece of equipment that doesn't add a DEF line item to the fuel budget is a genuine, if small, operational win.

Why Surface Prep and Cleanup Are Worth Owning, Not Subbing Out

Debris, milled material, and loose aggregate left on a surface before tack coat goes down is a direct cause of premature bond failure — asphalt laid over dirty pavement doesn't stick the way it's supposed to, and it shows up as raveling and potholes years earlier than it should. Most paving crews handle that step one of two ways: subcontract a sweeping company for a separate mobilization, or send someone out with a leaf blower and hope it's good enough. Both cost real time, and the second one is a real quality risk on any job where a DOT or municipal inspector is checking the surface before tack goes down. A crew running its own broom controls the schedule and the quality of that step instead of coordinating a fourth vendor's availability around its own.

Financing a Self-Sufficient Crew

Renting a distributor or subcontracting sweeping work for every job adds up fast, and none of that spending builds anything you still own once the job's done. Add a PR900 and an NB15 to a fleet that already includes a paver from our guide to LeeBoy's current asphalt paver lineup and a roller from LeeBoy's relaunched roller lineup, and you've got a crew that can bid, prep, tack, pave, compact, and clean a job start to finish without a single outside vendor in the mix — a genuine differentiator on public-bid work that rewards single-source accountability. Financing support equipment like this typically involves a smaller total investment than a paver or a full compaction roller, which usually means a more modest down payment relative to the headline equipment in your fleet — worth discussing directly with BFC rather than assuming it has to wait until after a bigger purchase. BFC finances the full range of paving support equipment alongside the pavers and rollers that do the headline work, specifically so a growing paving contractor can build that self-sufficiency into owned equipment instead of a rental and subcontracting bill that never stops. See our full roundup of what's new from LeeBoy in 2026 for the rest of the current lineup.

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