Since I run other equipment and not a grader, this might sound like a stupid question. But here goes anyway.
The local road where we live in the country is a really crappy gravel road. The municipality comes by with a grader once in a while, filling in the worst of the potholes and washboard. The road has a lot of rocks that keep coming up, including some a foot or more across. Most of the rocks are four to six inches across, and there are thousands of those just at the surface. For years, all the operators graded this road at a crawl, carefully watching their progress, banging along through the rocks. Sometimes they just made the mess worse, especially when they went too deep. Usually after the grader went by, we had to go along picking up the bigger rocks and throwing them off to the side.
The washboard got real bad lately, after no grading for three or four months. Then one day I heard the grader (a brand new Volvo) come flying down the road at road speed, at about twenty to thirty miles an hour. It went by in a flash, but to my surprise I saw that the blade was down. Then a few minutes later it came back the other way, and then it came by a third time.
The surprising thing is that the road is graded better than usual. And the operator did not drop the blade enough to pull up lots of rocks. I'm wondering if speed grading (or whatever it might be called) is a new or common technique. I'm wondering too what will happen when the blade catches one of the bigger rocks??
The local road where we live in the country is a really crappy gravel road. The municipality comes by with a grader once in a while, filling in the worst of the potholes and washboard. The road has a lot of rocks that keep coming up, including some a foot or more across. Most of the rocks are four to six inches across, and there are thousands of those just at the surface. For years, all the operators graded this road at a crawl, carefully watching their progress, banging along through the rocks. Sometimes they just made the mess worse, especially when they went too deep. Usually after the grader went by, we had to go along picking up the bigger rocks and throwing them off to the side.
The washboard got real bad lately, after no grading for three or four months. Then one day I heard the grader (a brand new Volvo) come flying down the road at road speed, at about twenty to thirty miles an hour. It went by in a flash, but to my surprise I saw that the blade was down. Then a few minutes later it came back the other way, and then it came by a third time.
The surprising thing is that the road is graded better than usual. And the operator did not drop the blade enough to pull up lots of rocks. I'm wondering if speed grading (or whatever it might be called) is a new or common technique. I'm wondering too what will happen when the blade catches one of the bigger rocks??