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I think they do plow with the blade all of the way down. Just hard to get into all of the low spots and undulations that make up the shitty roads in Colorado.
The guy that plows the community I live in successfully turns our streets into skating rinks every storm. When you leave the park the city streets are usually bare pavement. I think he has the blade up just enough to pack down a few inches with the weight of the blade which ices up.
Don't pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old to Fight, he'll just kill you.
Most municipalities have shoes or bogey wheels on their plows, they usually are about 1/8" above the pavement.
DOT plows are on the pavement, we had replaceable blades with a carbide insert. In a storm event such as this one it would not be unusual to go through a couple sets of blades.
Good times being squatted under a frozen plow @ 0200 dripping slush down your neck wrestling 125#, 6' long and 3/4" thick blades fishing 5/8" diameter bolts to hold them without them slipping out of your hand.
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Our HOA does not plow streets. Just common area sidewalk.
This is the side effect of having a low HOA fee.
Depends on the pavement material and condition. On Vail pass the plows remove 1-2 inches of asphalt per year. Mainly from the blades shaving the peaks of the ruts from truck tire chains. We are trying 3 concrete test sections to see if tire chain rutting can be mitigated. Monitoring the wear of the test sections and new asphalt placed last year.Originally Posted by theGinsue
Asphalt that is cracked is very vulnerable to freeze thaw damage causing layer delamination and chucking of the pavement.
On concrete blades can chip away the corners of the panels as they curl up from temperature diferential.
Most concrete placed in the last 40 years is air entrained to mitigate freezing damage. Most damage you see at joints is from the de-icer. The chloride reacts with the concrete and forms an expansive gel the beaks apart the concrete. This is mitigated with coal fly ash, slag or other pozzolanic materials. Cdot pavement for the past 20+ years has mitigated this reaction. Local roads, especially El Paso County concrete roads do not contain the required pozzolan for mitigation. This county is run by the developers who do not want to use it since it slows down strength gain a few days. These idiots running El Paso County are saving a few days today for expensive early age deterioration repairs and traffic delays.
The cost of blades is minimal compared to the cost of pavement.
Bert, I appreciate your comments and can relate to working on plows and heavy equipment outdoors in winter. We live off a state highway in an area of the mountains where we get a lot of snow. I've been plowing our driveway for almost sixty years and plowed commercially for several years. There are county side roads nearby so I watch the state and county plows nearly every day in winter. In almost every year we've had good service and lately the state and county crews have done an outstanding job.
Last week and again this afternoon the state road grader came through to push the roadside snow/ice berms back 6 feet or so. This is necessary because by mid winter the snow banks build up to where there's little room for the plows to move snow off the road. This is a big issue for any residents here because the driveway approaches get buried with dense snow by the state/county plowing operation. If you don't have a plow or snowthrower or both you're at a big disadvantage. After I clear the driveway and mailbox approach a lot of material gets packed in around the entry. Then the state grader comes through and drags a windrow of a few tons of snow into the driveway entry. No big deal. I'm so happy to have them move the material out of the way in time for the next storm.
Maybe it's just a job but I think of them as heroes.
Btw, here in the mountains the county plows also run the blades in direct contact with the pavement. Nothing to elevate the blades. When I bought my little Meyers plow I tried the blade shoes but they didn't hold up on our rocky gravel driveway. Besides, I want as clean a scrape as I can get. Some guys use strips of rubber conveyer belt material attached to the blades to reduce wear on the blade edge and any concrete surface damage.
13 to 14 inches down here at Colorado City
Snow totals varied all around the Front Range. We only got about 6 inches Tuesday into Wednesday but it's been cold. Minus 12 last evening when we went to bed. At 1:30 a.m. I got up to feed the wood stove and saw that we were down to minus 18 degrees. Fairly unusual here. By 4:30 a.m. the temp was back up to minus 12.
When my Active Army unit supported snow plow operations on post, we put polyethene edges on the road grader blades. I think they also used them on the plow units designed to mate to the front of a 5-ton.
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Eric P, very interesting information about surface wear factors but not surprising. For some time I worked heavy and highway and operated concrete plants for many years. In the early 70's, air entrainment was an extra cost additive and many contractors didn't buy it. A few years later it became industry standard and a required part of the mix package. The early fly ash mixes flowed nicely but didn't hold up very well. I wonder if steel pellets mixed with concrete might be cost effective? I don't know about current practices but it was used for heavy traffic warehouse floors.
I notice a lot of roadside tree loss from mag chloride but haven't seen an effort to remove the dead trees. I would guess that failed catalytic converters probably start a majority of highway fires and I expect the problem will get worse in the next few years.
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