Rough dirt roads

[old man emu]

Ever wonder how come corrugations form on an unsealed road? Here's a video which explains it. The video is a bit slow to start so advance to 6:30 to miss the fluff.

 

 

[willedoo]

They're awful things; two things I don't miss about out there are corrugations and flies. The worst corrugations I've ever encountered were on the Kintore road after you turn off the Tanami road. From the turnoff it's about 375 klm to Kintore and about 200 klm of that was really bad corrugations with no let up hour after hour. It was the sheer distance of the corrugated section that made it so bad. We had a couple of casualties - one of the towed dongas had some suspension come apart so we had to take the wheel off and chain the axle up. The worst bit was late in the afternoon when a fuel tanker on the back of a body truck split a seam. We off loaded as much fuel as we could into trucks, machines and Toyotas but had to leave the tanker truck there overnight. Moving it would have ruptured it more and been a major fuel spill. With the level lowered, the pressure behind the leak wasn't as bad but it still lost a lot onto the road which the local council wasn't happy about. We borrowed a heap of 44's from a local station and a couple of the blokes came back with the float and a hand pump and offloaded fuel into the drums. They were going all night and into the next day to get all the fuel, about three trips they did.

 

We found the best trucks to handle that rough country were the W series Kenworths. The cabs held up much better than Macks and other makes. You could buy some really good second hand road train rated W series trucks at fairly cheap prices. For the people selling them, they were no longer viable or economical for highway work, but they were still good for many years of desert bashing.

[willedoo]

Thinking in hindsight about the leaking fuel tanker in the above post. They tried everything they had on hand to try and stop the leak which at pressure was a big spray of fuel. After giving it some thought, if we'd had some rubber matting or belting as a bandage and decent sized ratchet straps on hand to hold it, we could have possibly slowed it to a dribble at least. A bit like how Captain Cook and Co. saved the Endeavour off Cooktown.