Welcome to the forum AK20! So is your job operating the Grader? Can you explain the procedure for ice paving the highway? More or less from start to finish? Nice picture! Beautiful country out there.
Thanks for the welcome, good to be here. For DOT we pretty much have to run everything, not really one person runs the same thing every day. Example, this week at work I ran the grader the whole time, my last shift I ran a tractor pulling a 8,5000 gallon water tanker for icing. So pretty much we all run graders, dozers, track hoe, tractor-trailer, compacters, front-end loaders, snow blowers, etc. It's a camp job, 1 week on 1 week off, we fly in since most of us live over 300 miles from the camp.
As for our icing procedures, I'll do my best to explain...also, the History Channel came up a couple months ago and filmed us in action, supposed to air this year in a new program called "Tougher in Alaska", so watch out to that if your really want a good explanation.
First thing, were using a 14H with those button bits like MKTEF has pictured above. We will make a couple passes over the road usually from the center out, the object is scratch up some fines and snow and kick them into windrows running down both shoulders, we usually do between 1-4 miles at time. The blade will prep a little first thing while the tankers our loading and hauling, then as time permits through the day. So after you have your lanes prepped your ready to go, we just go from mile marker to mile marker to make it easy, trying to get 8 loads a mile @ about 8k gallons = 64K gallons total, give or take. So start your water tanker at the beginning of the pass dumping water, the blade basically grabs the windrow off the shoulder and brings it to wards the center of the road. The next load will be in the opposite lane, this time the blade takes the windrow from the center going to wards the opposite shoulder he started in. Then you work your way back across in the opposite direction, your not really using a lot down pressure as you don't want to cut the road, just feathering the material in with the water. You go back in forth across the road a couple times, then cap the area off with a high speed pass from water tanker to keep everything in place...mind you your average speed with the grader and tanker working is 11-15 mph(5th or 6th gear in the grader) to keep the water from freezing as you go. It's super easy to do, just hard to explain very well, if you have any other ?'s shoot.
The pictures you can kind of see what I'm talking about, if you look around the Caribou.
