"Pavement"

The local county road maintenance crew just "paved" several miles of road leading up to my house.

I put paved in quotes because what they actually did was render the road virtually unridable.

I'm wondering if this kind of paving happens in other parts of the county (or in other countries)

What they did is barely fill a few potholes, spray some sticky tar on the surface of the otherwise decent road, then sprinkle a bunch of loose gravel on the tar.

They sprinkle so much damm gravel down and only about half of it actually sticks, so as you can imagine it doesn't make for much of a riding surface.

Imagine buckets of loose gravel on top of pavement for miles. The road is fairly twisty too, which makes for nice riding most of the time, but not when it's covered in gravel.

Do they do this kind of "paving" where you are too?

I'm hoping that in a couple weeks most of the loose gravel will get thrown off the road and I can get a little more riding in.

Yes the "Spray Paving" or "Chipped and Sealed" are common road works practice.
After the traffic packs it down, and the Tar hardens it will be fine. Not proper Black Top, so won't be any high speed road. But better than gravel or dirt.

Topper wrote: The local county road maintenance crew just "paved" several miles of road leading up to my house.

I put paved in quotes because what they actually did was render the road virtually unridable.

I'm wondering if this kind of paving happens in other parts of the county (or in other countries)

What they did is barely fill a few potholes, spray some sticky tar on the surface of the otherwise decent road, then sprinkle a bunch of loose gravel on the tar.

They sprinkle so much damm gravel down and only about half of it actually sticks, so as you can imagine it doesn't make for much of a riding surface.

Imagine buckets of loose gravel on top of pavement for miles. The road is fairly twisty too, which makes for nice riding most of the time, but not when it's covered in gravel.

Do they do this kind of "paving" where you are too?

I'm hoping that in a couple weeks most of the loose gravel will get thrown off the road and I can get a little more riding in.

They "Chip and seal here in Indiana too. It doesn't do too bad if they actually roll it after but they don't want to spend the money. So all the county roads are this way at least some time within 15 years or so. Dumbest thing I ever saw was they spent the time to actually level up and pave a road near my house. Then 3 months later Chip and sealed it. :sick: Really pisses me off becouse it would have lasted twice as long if they hadn't. They done this two years ago and its already cracking up. But my road that I live on hasn't been touched except dry patch for the last 11 years I've lived here.

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They do that around here once a year. At end of driveway and about 100 yds. out, the road was so bad people were driving in the ditch to get around the "holes" and tore up road surface. Road crew came and leveled off the high spots and dumped gravel in the holes...laid down a cover of tar and put down a layer of gravel. Took about a month before the gravel was either pushed to side of road or imbedded in the tar. Then...within the month, all those holes broke up again and that loose gravel started coming out. Now we have a nice pot-holed raod that gets worse by the day because of all the trucks using it instead of the main road to get to their terminals. Rain? Stay away because you can't tell how deep those holes are. lol

The expression is "Chip Seal" The practice is very old and well honored. Back in the day, a road could be considered paved with as little as two coats of Oil ( Tar ) and two coats of stone ( Chips ).

The resultant pavement was called "Macadam" which was a precursor to asphalt.

Layers of chip seal are still applied over asphalt.


Bill