Road construction

Hello

I am brand new to this forum, so I will be having a lot of questions on country life. For 32 years, I have lived in large towns - with all the traffic, shops, and everything else that goes along with it. Now, I live in a rural area which is at least 30 min. from those places. So, there are things that I don't understand.

This is just a curiosity. Every so often, I see signs along the road that says "fresh oil". What does this mean, and why is there fresh oil? Recently, a road was tarred, which made it pretty nice. But then a few weeks weeks later, they put one of those oil signs up. And then, pebbles were put down. Now the road is rough. Why do they do this?

Stefan

It's a bandaid type repaving system. Just to keep the roads drivable until they can be properly repaved. A lot of times, a particular road is so busy they may have to do this for a year or more before they can do adequate maintenence.

Stefan, welcome to CBN. Around here we call that seal coat.

It's a cheap way to maintain a road, add rock, heavy oil and let the cars and trucks roll it for you. Add the signs "loose rock" and "fresh oil".

And unless you drive incredibly slowly through that "fresh oil" you'll have specks of it splattered on your car; more like tar than oil. They can be pretty tough to get off sometimes. I've found that WD-40 works about as well as anything, but maybe someone else knows of something better.

Anything such as gasoline, diesel, kerosene, varsol should work for getting it off.

It makes for great undercoating too.

Egon

Ok, thanks for the info. I still don't understand why they take a newly tarred road and "seal" it with this.

Stefan

The chip coat adds traction, makes your headlights more efficient and also helps maintain the life of the road.

Egon