Ah, summer time. The time of year I most enjoy, the time of year that brings about backyard barbecues, fresh peaches, and less confining clothes. It truly is a beautiful time and thoughts of the dreariness of winter are scorned and banished from conversation.
Yet there are other summertime events that many scorn and want to banish simply because it is perceived as an annoyance. You know, things like mosquitos, humidity, and road construction. There are benefits of each, but few want to acknowledge them as such. What are the benefits? Well, since by its very name, Curbside Classic would preclude mosquitos and humidity, let’s discuss the virtues of road construction.
My daytime job allows me to cover quite a large area, so I’m currently seeing a lot of construction projects. One day recently while traveling the hills and hollers south of I-44, I came upon a wee bit of road construction. To be more accurate, it was road maintenance. There is a distinct difference. So I stopped, talked, and got some pictures. A fascinating process it was.
I talked at length to a gentleman named Pat. A delightful, no-nonsense fellow, he was in charge of the operation. He told me they were chip-sealing the road. Pat said to think of a road like you would your car – both need periodic maintenance and it’s a lot easier to maintain a road that is in good condition than one that has deteriorated. He said this process is like waxing your car or putting on suntan lotion as either will block out the bad. The oil keeps the water out and the rock gives you friction to drive on.
Here’s the step by step process. And it is quite choreographed.
After the road is swept, a distributor will shoot oil. Here it is spraying oil at a rate of 0.26 gallons per square yard. Pat knew his stuff.
Right on the tail of the distributor is a chip spreader. The head is adjustable in width and was applying rock at 11.5 pounds per square yard. The spreader will pull the truck while it is dumping.
The trucks dump into the back of the chip spreader. A belt brings the rock to the front.
After the rock is placed, it is rolled down.
Four rollers, you ask? Pat said that was to allow one pass and for safety. With one pass, the rollers don’t have to go back and forth or go as quickly. This operation moved quite rapidly and the road can be driven on within minutes after the material is placed.
The day I was there, Pat said there were four distributors and seventeen dump trucks in the operation.
So even though these machines aren’t the typical Curbside Classic, these machines aren’t plentiful and they help the Curbside Classics in the area (and there were many) go where they need to go.
…and that freshly tar and chipped surface is a slick as ice for the first week or two until the loose gravel on top gets packed in well…
Hated those newly chip-sealed roads when I was riding my motorcycle. Avoid at any cost.
Bicyclists too. And not just when they’re new. When budgets were better, the rural roads/highways around here used to get genuine smooth asphalt; now it’s chip seal, which makes for a crappy ride on high pressure bike tires.
I must be the only motorcycle rider here who doesn’t hate chip seal. I’ve always found the traction excellent, and I can cope when it gets soft and squirmy on really hot days.
I DID once burn off a brand-new rear tire in less than 900 miles. Lots of throttle wheelspin on wet chip seal on a group ride. It’s like taking a cheese grater to your tire. That was when I got dubbed the Tireminator.
Steve65–
As a rider, I’m OK w/ chip seal too, at least once it’s broken in and all the loose stuff is gone. Good grip wet or dry, and easier to deal with on a rainy night than fresh black asphalt.
I’d still prefer nice asphalt, but chip seal beats mediocre asphalt and tar snakes by a country mile. Concrete/cement roads are the worst, unless very new and smooth, which they almost never are. The smoothest concrete road I ever encountered was a rebuilt section of I-29 in the Red River Valley in North Dakota. Between the smooth surface and the dead flat terrain, it was like a pool table. 95 mph on my FJR1300 and I could barely stay awake.
The traction is excellent ONCE THE CHIPS ARE SEATED in the asphalt/oil base. That takes more than one trip with those doo-hickeys; it takes about a week’s heavy traffic.
Until then…it’s frequently like riding on loose rock. You squirm and slide, and if you hit a big rock with a tire, it can roll and send you sideways and maybe lose control.
Mercifully, they stopped chips sealing here years ago. Now we get some really good asphalt. For a province with such a hostile climate, the roads are surprisingly well maintained. We get everything here, rock and snow avalanches, floods, you name it. The winter avalanche threat is a particularly bad one in the mountains.
Here in my province, they cut the road budget by 60% this year to save costs. Chip sealing is done on all but the major highways and not at all in the cities. I suppose it’s better than dirt and mud.
Needless to say, the rural roads look like the surface of the moon and I’m choosing to drive my truck instead of my car a lot more often now.
+1 on the motorcyclists’ bane.
Hit that stuff before a week’s traffic rolls over it…and the tires are squirming all over the place. From a biker’s point of view, it’s LETHAL.
Should be warnings, just as there are with grooved pavement…much more necessary. I’ll go ten miles around to avoid a quarter-mile patch of that stuff…
I worked for an outfit that water blasted the shiny tar bleed thru off and left the chip suface for traction interesting machine that did that. 3 40,000 psi rotating blast heads driven by a 350hp Detroit and a fierce vacuum system that sucked all the debris up all mounted on a 6 wheeler Isuzu. My official title was tanker driver but I was also given the remote to operate the blast truck not a bad job actually dirty but that was probably the only real drawback at the time.
Great article. It’s interesting to see how things are done in different areas. Here in BC it’s all done by contractors and the idea of using 4 rollers on the job would probably give any one of them a heart attack. In this neck of the woods the excess aggregate is swept off after about a week. It is indeed a good place to avoid on your motorcycle.
At the moment, due to the actions of one irresponsible contractor a few years ago, the province does not allow chip seal on numbered highways so it’s only used on side roads. One of the few benefits of the metric system we use in Canada is the easy conversion on jobs like this. Around here it’s “litre per meter on the emulsion, 5 kilos per meter on the aggregate.
Anyway, like I said, great article. But it is Sunday and I probably shouldn’t be thinking about things like this.
That was a result of the seal coat job between Duncan to Lake Cowichan, around 1982. The company didn’t do it right and anybody who drove up there, me included, had the windshield of their car smashed. The government paid out on all the broken glass and they never did a major road again.
That is a great highway, too, by the way. Straight and fast with nice scenery the whole way.
In theory I understand why they do this, but I hate the road quality after the fact. About ten years ago the road commission did this to some of the highways around here. I got caught in a line of cars that was behind a crew doing this. The resulting loose pebbles and such flying up did a job to my car’s paint job. I called the county and complained, they didn’t seem to care…
I didn’t know they did this until recently. They just resurfaced our main drag last year and this year they sealed it. It wasn’t “chip sealed” as they just sprayed the erl down and left.
It’s been a long while since our road was tar and chipped. We’re in one of the poorest counties in Illinois, and we’re lucky to get a shovel full of gravel in the really bad potholes every now and then.
That looks like a road that’s well kept. I can look out my front window and see five foot long cracks in the asphalt on my street that will fill up with water and then freeze this winter, thus leading to a minor pothole next year, than a hellacious pothole a couple of years after that. I’ve called the city about it, but no go. They don’t level the roads here either, they just keep adding sinking layer after sinking layer of blacktop after filling the potholes. I’ve never seen paved street moguls of Olympic quality before, but we sure as hell have them in southwest Little Rock, Arkansas.
The tax dollars at work! You Americans s should be so lucky that your government is taking such a good care of your roads. What a joy travelling on a well maintained roads! I know it varies between states, and some aren’t taking care of their roads as well. But I think these road construction workers are rather underappreciated, people usually just complain of the traffic jams and road blockade that they caused.
I just took a trip to the mountains outside Jakarta yesterday, and the main roads are poor by your standards. And the secondary/tertiary ones? Just horrible. You can hardly go faster than crawling speeds. I remember traveling those roads as a young man, and they were quite smooth, and very enjoyable twisty mountain roads. Say what you will about our former dictator, but he did better at maintaining roads.
Very interesting. I like an out-of-the-ordinary CC once in a while.
This was a little our of our line – we did mostly land clearing and dirt moving, but we did put in a new road once, so it’s nice to read about the surfacing and maintenance end of the business.
In Virginia, many of our back roads are chipped sealed like this. The road running by my workplace in the country is chip sealed, as are the streets in my small suburban subdivision.
I know they can be slippery at first; one morning my boss and I came across a woman who had overturned her Ranger on a twisty section near our workplace. She was okay, but we had to wait for the EMTs to arrive to get her out of the vehicle.