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.

[Grumpy Old Nasho]

That's a very informative video ... I should send it to my Local Council with a request to fix my unsealed street. In fact, I've heard rumors they will be doing something about it soon before One Nation cracks down on them.

Edited 21 hours ago by Grumpy Old Nasho

[onetrack]

So Pauline is going to set up a whole new level of bureaucratic oversight, something like Trumps DOGE? Let me know how that works in practical terms - it seems like DOGE went out the window long ago, with virtually zero savings.

 

DOGE was shut down 8 mths ahead of schedule, and it no longer exists. Musk claimed DOGE saved US$214B in Govt waste and losses - the reality is, his claims were total BS, DOGE saved nothing in the final washup, and it is reported that overall, DOGE actually cost U.S. taxpayers, by the time the cost of having to rehire important people fired by DOGE operatives, and lawsuits by Govt employees unfairly dismissed, were taken into account.

 

 

 

[willedoo]

14 hours ago, Grumpy Old Nasho said:

That's a very informative video ... I should send it to my Local Council with a request to fix my unsealed street.

Hopefully they'll have the money to fix it. Our council is flat broke to the tune of one billion dollars in the red. They've been spending money like drunken sailors trying to imitate the Gold Coast and now the shite has hit the fan. I'm a bit cynical I suppose, but my guess is higher rates and more potholes before any of the more than 1,000 bludgers sitting behind desks lose their jobs. They have way more sitting on their arse in the offices than they do out in the world doing some work. More than half the rates income goes to paying council staff.

[facthunter]

There's rough roads and Corrugated roads, They are not really the same.  A corrugated road may still have a sound Base and just require a grader at the right time. Nev

[willedoo]

A big problem with them is they reappear fairly quickly. The grader only knocks the tops off them. I can remember grader drivers telling me how deep the corrugations go below the surface as they found out at times when they've had to cut the surface right back. They can extend a foot or two below the surface like hard ants nest.

[facthunter]

You have to grade them AFTER rain, not just scrape the top few inches.  Nev

[willedoo]

It wouldn't be a bad job grading those roads if you liked a bit of solitude. I've seen quite a few setups where they have two graders and a joint camp. I ran into one bloke once who worked on his own. He had a donga with everything in it, sleeping quarters, kitchen and bathroom. The 40' trailer also had the spare space for a fuel tank and genset. He had a satellite dish as well. He would estimate the distance of a day's work and tow the donga trailer and Toyota behind the grader to where he was going to make camp for the night, then set up camp and do a grade down to the start point and back. You'd need a compact, self contained camp like that if you were moving camp daily otherwise it would drive you mad. He worked equal time job sharing with another bloke. I can't remember what hitch they'd do, it might have been two weeks on/two weeks off.

[willedoo]

7 minutes ago, facthunter said:

You have to grade them AFTER rain, not just scrape the top few inches.  Nev

Grading after rain works in some areas where they get rain, but you'd be waiting a long time between grades in a lot of this country Nev. A lot of the country has a six to eight inch annual rainfall if you're lucky. That's where water trucks come into the equation.

[pmccarthy]

I read a book once about trucking. It said corrugations and bull dust only appeared with pneumatic tyres. When trucks had solids, up to the 1920s, it wasn’t a problem.

[willedoo]

It shakes bolts out of trailers which is the biggest cause of flat tyres on those roads. Frustrating for the truckies blowing $500 tyres.

[willedoo]

44 minutes ago, pmccarthy said:

I read a book once about trucking. It said corrugations and bull dust only appeared with pneumatic tyres. When trucks had solids, up to the 1920s, it wasn’t a problem.

Pete, I guess also as truck design advanced, the extra weight would play a part as well.

[onetrack]

It was more likely the increased speed of trucks with pneumatic tyres that created the corrugations, not the move from solids to pneumatics.

Pneumatic tyres on trucks started to appear in 1920 and by about 1925, virtually all trucks were on pneumatics, only the big heavy haul low loaders still used solid wheels and they only travelled at low speeds.

 

People forget about the early low motoring speeds and the low speed limits. In the 1920's to even after WW2, the speed limit for "heavy" trucks in Australia was 15mph (25kmh). "Heavy" was 3 tons or more.

Truckies fought for higher speed limits and were often fined for driving "at dangerous speed" - like 25mph (40kmh). During WW2, military convoys ran at 30mph (50kmh) maximum speed to save on tyre wear and preserve road surfaces.

 

Trucks were geared to be flat out at low speeds. Ford V8's were the fastest trucks around, they could do 40-45mph, but that was well over official truck speed limits. 

WW2 trucks were all geared to about 35 mph maximum speed. The big Military Federals and Reos were flat out at 28mph, they had 10:1 diff ratios for heavy haulage.

Bedfords were happiest at about 30mph, they start to scream their guts out at 35mph, and if you could get them to 40mph, that was their absolute limit.

 

Roads were simply poor in the pre-WW2 era and it took a while after WW2 for roads to be upgraded. The 1950's saw a lot of road improvements, widening and sealing.

When the first post-war Kenworths and Macks arrived here in the late 1950's, they could do 100kmh (62mph) - but the official maximum truck speed limit was still only 80kmh. So you risked serious fines for doing more than 80kmh.

When I bought my first Mack F-700 (cabover) in 1975, the Mack did over 100kmh, but the truck speed limit was still 80kmh. It took until about 1978 to raise the truck speed limit to 100kmh, and that was only after a lot of arguments against raising it.

 

And when you see this (video below), you start to understand that a lot of roads and drivers are still not up to their trucks capabilities.

 

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/18cqZRTEaz/