Dear mid-60s Buick fans of where the rubber meets the road,
The street in front of our house finally was repaved after over 50 years of nothing more than sloppy patches. It was a interesting process and I thought I would share some pictures of how it was done. The first thing they did was some seriously tough medicine - they removed all the asphalt and left us with nothing but a dirt road:
They used the same machine that they used to mix cement with the dirt as you will see in later photos. After removing the asphalt they piled up a lot of dirt to serve as a temporary road. The next step was to run a machine to reduce the height of the earth they had piled up. This was quite an operation. Here is a dump truck being loaded by the earth leveling machine:
Here is the boom of the machine that has the conveyor belt that lifts the soil and sends it into the dump truck:
Finally, here is a photo of the side of machine itself:
The next step was to get a flat base for the new road. To do this they turned to the traditional road grader:
After they were finished with that session of earth removal they sent a road roller to compact the newly exposed soil:
That's all the road we had for over a week.
The next step was to mix cement with the soil to make a foundation for the asphalt. This started by simply dispensing dry cement on the soil:
They then mix the soil using a machine that was also used to first remove the old asphalt. In front of it was a water truck to supply water to the cement:
Then this machine mixed it all up:
That left the road looking like this:
Finally this machine finished up the mixing:
After that a road grader got the dirt back to reasonably level.
The process of actually laying the asphalt started with spraying a layer of tar against the lip of the street:
Then the dump trucks started running up and down our street. It was a quite a caravan. Eventually the paving machine came into view:
It has this odd hopper at the front that is loaded almost constantly by asphalt from dump trucks. Here is the moment that asphalt was put in front of our own driveway:
Behind it of course came the typical road roller:
The paving machine of course had to make a second pass for the other side of the street:
Here is a close up of the asphalt being deposited onto the ground:
Here is a view of the newly paved street:
Finally, here is one last view of the paving machine and the road roller "heading off into the sunset!"
It sure is an improvement over the worn out street we used to have, but I can see the asphalt isn't of particularly good quality. This new road certainly won't last 50 years!
Hopefully this has been a pleasant distraction from working on your cars!
Cheers, Edouard
