[TheForge] Adventures in steel delivery.

[Jerry Frost]

I'm way behind my E-mail load . . . AGAIN. Big surprise huh? Oh well, that's 
what happens when I find something to do in the shop. <grin>

Yeah, that's clay all right, Andy. Seems everywhere has it's own special 
brand of BAD clay, Central Cal has Kimberly clay, Utah and many others have 
Gumbo: black, red, yellow, gray, etc. Most of the ground around here is too 
recent to have much of a clay lense close enough to cause problems, still 
does though. Most of ours right here abouts is red, organically decomposed 
aolean clay. Aolean being air born, dust for normal folk but I gotta do 
SOMETHING with all the crap I learned for the materials headquarters 
houndations investigations section of the geology dept. don't I? It's the 
source of the really rich loes soils here in the Matanuska Valley.

All clay is hard as concrete when dry so long as it's not broken up. When it 
rains the surface soaks up water and becomes a permanent hydroplaning 
surface. Then as water soaks down it gets softer and softer till it hits 
it's liquid limit where it becomes a trap for anything that crosses it, I've 
seen flies trapped in mud. some mud is sticky, some just gooey but it's all 
a pita.

For primitive road stabilization you can lay corduroy or just keep laying 
gravel on it and let it get driven into the clay. Corduroy is a long time 
traditional way of making clay stable enough for roads. Make sure the logs 
you cut are longer than the road is wide by a substantial margin or they'll 
tip and turn into BAD things. Driving gravel into the clay works so long as 
you don't have too much subterranean water, eventually enough gravel will 
allow water to flow through it without making soup. Also gravel particles 
will stay in contact with each other and not flow so easily becoming more 
stable.

Typar is good stuff but you don't have the money nor expertise to build a 
floating roadbed so it's not going to do a whole bunch of  good. Typar is 
intended to
ALLOW water to pass without letting soil particles through. This is intended 
to keep drains, say a: French drain, Dry well, or sub grade lateral drain 
bed from getting plugged by fines. It's literally a filter to keep fines 
from plugging your drains. It is NOT intended to keep water from passing 
through.

Where Typar is super for roadbed stabilization is when you're building on 
deeply bedded organics. You lay yout Typar directly on the muskeg and start 
filling over it. The Typar is driven straight down into the peat or whatever 
saturated orgaincs you're dealing with and the water is forced up through 
the Typar. If you're patient the typar will eventually compress the organics 
till they can no longer compress and the water flows through or around the 
fill. The state of the compresed organics is called Hydrostatic. Meaning 
water can no longer move through it and whatever water content it still has 
is there for good.

That will NOT work for your soil conditions. It works for Ries because his 
soils are loes and not just deep clays, his soils will perk. Most folk call 
almost any fine grained mud clay, most folk didn't work in a soils lab where 
the difference between clay and silt makes for a multi million dollar law 
suit. Silt mud will stick almost any surface vehicle just as well as clay 
but it's a different breed of mud.

So, here's a method of stabilization that's NOT at all popular with any 
soils engineer worth a fart. Wait till the road is dry enough to be almost 
concrete hard, still has a little moisture but won't take a print from 
anything softer than a hammer blow. Grade the road with a little crown 
leading from uphill to downhill, that's across the road. Grade it 
substantially wider than your desired road width, at least 10' on either 
side. These wide margins are to become your ditches but no more than 18" 
deep away from the roadbed. Make this as close to ground level as possible 
and cover it with the heaviest fiber reinforced visquene you can find 
that'll cover it in one piece. If you have to lap it, as you will lengthwise 
down the road, make the laps around 3'. Lay Typar under the deepest 3' of 
the ditch section and lap it up and out of the ditch. Fill the ditch area 
with bone rock and lap the Typar over it and as far towards the road as 
possible. This will prevent the clay from plugging the bone rock "French 
drain" so the water can flow off and away from your driveway. The bone rock 
in the ditch section should hump up a couple feet and be say 5-6' wide 
towards the roadbed. Now lay a single lift of fairly clean (minimal fines) 
material on the tarp and up to the bone rock ditch drain. Cover this lift 
with Typar, it is your drain field!

Okay, to give you a picture of what you're doing. Picture a cross section, 
looking up your road with the uphill side on your right. This is how I'm 
envisioning it so it's how I'm describing it, it can go either way.) Now the 
cross section is gently terraced into the hillside and the road's subgrade 
is pitched slightly downhill. Pitch it on the order of 1" to 10'. The ditch 
is on the downhill side, it is notched a couple feet into the existing soil 
and is the anchor to keep your road from sliding downhill. The visquene lays 
over the grade from just beyond the uphill edge to the downhill edge. The 
Typar extends above the uphill margin and folds over the bone rock. The 
uphill bone rock is the dike that keeps water and clay from over flowing 
onto your road, the Typar keeps the clay from infiltrating your drain rock 
so water will flow. The downhill margin is built the same way as the uphill 
margin for the same reason except the bone rock dike is to keep your road 
from sliding downhill.

As you fill, do it in lifts, the first couple lifts need to be compactible 
but coarse enough water can drain through it without sitting and this Typar 
is to keep it draining. Fill your darned drive till it's at LEAST 1' above 
OG. (OG being Original Ground level) This will leave you with a drive that 
will not sink our of site in wet season without you having to go to the 
expense of excavating WAY deep and filling with a drain rock layer a few 
feet thick and hoping the clay doesn't infiltrate through the Typar ayway. 
Freeze thaw will break down almost any road grade eventually.

The whole idea behind the above NON-Aproved method is to prevent water from 
reaching the clay under your roadbed at all. Typar lets water THROUGH, 
visquene PREVENTS water from getting through. The soils on either side are 
going to turn to ooze like normal so if some yahoo drives off your road 
simply kill him/er and use their vehicle for fill. Please make sure this 
applies to YOU. Stay the hell ON your road till things dry up!

Give me a shout on the side and I'll shoot you some sketches.

Jer
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andrew Vida" <osan at netlabs.net>
To: "Blacksmithing List Sponsored by ABANA" <theforge at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2013 8:05 AM
Subject: Re: [TheForge] Adventures in steel delivery.


> This road was cut from the mountainside.  It is 2 years old + and stable. 
> Been using it when reasonably dry, so it is pretty well walked-in.
>
> This clay may not be anything you've encountered before - it is like 
> concrete when dry and like ice when it gets too wet.  Murderously so and 
> ANY vehicle including tracked can get completely hosed in it, especially 
> if there is more than about a 2* grade.  If you have not seen it first 
> hand you would have a hard time believing it.  When this shit is REALLY 
> wet, a D6 would have a very difficult time getting out of this driveway. 
> Twenty feet east and it would bury itself in no time and would have to sit 
> until things dried out before it could climb out of the bowl.
>
> I dug a good drainage ditch and it works well - put in a pair of 12" 
> culverts in, one halfway up, the other about 30' from the house. Digging 
> those ditches was loads of fun.
>
> On 3/14/2013 9:27 AM, wmullett at bright.net wrote:
>> You can't build any road just on top unless your already on a solid 
>> foundation.  So if you already don't have a base, your just wasting 
>> money.
>>
>> Before the fancy fabrics, the process was still basically the same as 
>> what Frosty writes.  Excavate the top/sub soil to below frost and build 
>> your base then add your top layers.
>>
>> For a drive, if you have decent, draining sub soil, you might get away 
>> with less base depth but clay is not it.
>>