Deas Plant
Senior Member
Grading techniques.
Hi, Folks.
I've seen this thread before and have read bits and pieces of it from time to time but haven't posted earlier due to lack of time.
I too am interested in the different techniques and the similarities of the problems faced in widely differing parts of the world. I too have had problems with grass and other vegetation on road shoulders. Depending on the situation and the available equipment, I would either have to windrow it in from the edge for a TLB to pick up and load out on trucks or grade it off outside the table drain to allow access to some relatively clean gravel from the shoulder to cut across the road AND back again. On most of the gravel road maintenance that I have done, corrugations were a more common problem than potholes. Some of these corrugations might be 4" - 5" deep, depending on volume and type of traffic, material in the roadbed, recent weather conditions and elapsed time since the last grading. Most common corrugation range would have been 3" - 4" deep.
It didn't take long to realise that a simple once-over didn't last very long, especially in the deeper corrugations, in relation to the time taken to do the job. I found that the bigger corrugations needed twice-over, grading the material back across the road and travelling in the same directions on the second time over as the first time for each pass but with the blade angled the opposite way. This involved travelling empty from one end to the other after completing the first cut over so that I could have the blade angled the opposite way for the second cut. This seemed to do a better job of cutting the tops off the corrugations and filling the bottoms than simply turning around and grading the material back across the road and the end resulted lasted better too. I might add that having any sort of roller was a definite luxury.
One place where this system REALLY did pay off was a couple of stretches of the access road on the Mount Newman Railway Project in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The local 'soil' looked like a coarse sand but was in fact eroded quartz. It packed down pretty hard and was extremely abrasive. If you tried to cut it without first scarifying it, you could rip a set of cutting edges to shreds in 7 - 8 hours. You could also do a fair bit of 'damage' to a set of scarifier boots when scarifying it. The trick was to pull a windrow out of the bank on one side, grade it across the road, then travel empty back to the other end, pick up the same windrow plus a bit more and grade it back again, filling the corrugations rather than trying to cut them.
One operator, unused to this material and working night shift, wore a set of cutting edges from about 60% remaining down to half the bolt-holes gone and NO cutting edges in less than a 10 hour shift, all through trying to cut these corrugations - after having been told not to and why.
The rail formation in these areas was built with scrapers. This material was murder on the scraper cutting edges too. Thank God there was only about 40 - 45 miles of this country out of a total of about 270 miles of railway line.
Let the exchange continue.
Hi, Folks.
I've seen this thread before and have read bits and pieces of it from time to time but haven't posted earlier due to lack of time.
I too am interested in the different techniques and the similarities of the problems faced in widely differing parts of the world. I too have had problems with grass and other vegetation on road shoulders. Depending on the situation and the available equipment, I would either have to windrow it in from the edge for a TLB to pick up and load out on trucks or grade it off outside the table drain to allow access to some relatively clean gravel from the shoulder to cut across the road AND back again. On most of the gravel road maintenance that I have done, corrugations were a more common problem than potholes. Some of these corrugations might be 4" - 5" deep, depending on volume and type of traffic, material in the roadbed, recent weather conditions and elapsed time since the last grading. Most common corrugation range would have been 3" - 4" deep.
It didn't take long to realise that a simple once-over didn't last very long, especially in the deeper corrugations, in relation to the time taken to do the job. I found that the bigger corrugations needed twice-over, grading the material back across the road and travelling in the same directions on the second time over as the first time for each pass but with the blade angled the opposite way. This involved travelling empty from one end to the other after completing the first cut over so that I could have the blade angled the opposite way for the second cut. This seemed to do a better job of cutting the tops off the corrugations and filling the bottoms than simply turning around and grading the material back across the road and the end resulted lasted better too. I might add that having any sort of roller was a definite luxury.
One place where this system REALLY did pay off was a couple of stretches of the access road on the Mount Newman Railway Project in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The local 'soil' looked like a coarse sand but was in fact eroded quartz. It packed down pretty hard and was extremely abrasive. If you tried to cut it without first scarifying it, you could rip a set of cutting edges to shreds in 7 - 8 hours. You could also do a fair bit of 'damage' to a set of scarifier boots when scarifying it. The trick was to pull a windrow out of the bank on one side, grade it across the road, then travel empty back to the other end, pick up the same windrow plus a bit more and grade it back again, filling the corrugations rather than trying to cut them.
One operator, unused to this material and working night shift, wore a set of cutting edges from about 60% remaining down to half the bolt-holes gone and NO cutting edges in less than a 10 hour shift, all through trying to cut these corrugations - after having been told not to and why.
The rail formation in these areas was built with scrapers. This material was murder on the scraper cutting edges too. Thank God there was only about 40 - 45 miles of this country out of a total of about 270 miles of railway line.
Let the exchange continue.