07Dec2017: Grading Baer Hill

Today I graded with my Kubota B5200 for the first time.  It is a compact tractor, and did get stuck a couple of times, but getting unstuck is easy.  Overall I think it came out ok.  This is the little guy's second grading use.  The first was with Rosendo.  That time went poorly, I think because the road was dry.  This attempt was made after two nights of intermittent light rain and cloudy days, and it went great.

Blade Angle: my Tractor Supply blade does not have a tilt adjustment, but it does rotate 360 degrees with 10 preset stops.  With the cutting edge forward, the blade digs just fine.  With the blade turned all the way around and the cutting edge backward, the blade smooths pretty well.  With the blade on the first stop clockwise, ends at 10 and 4 o'clock, whatever you dig up flows naturally to your right eventually, but also piles up in the cup of the blade to fill in low spots.

Blade Height: The height adjustment has three settings: down (forward), neutral (middle) and up (back).  The up position has a linkage that returns the control lever to center when the hitch is all the way up, but you can leave the control lever in the down position to really push the blade into the ground.  The top link of the 3 point hitch plays into this too.  I have an extension that should allow the blade to push lower, at the expense of not being able to raise it very high.

Traction: On the East (Townsend) side of Baer Hill, there are a couple of low/soft places where the drive wheels lose traction going uphill with a full bucket.  So it is best to go downhill on that side and uphill on the west (Nofziger) side. 

Mower Deck: Peg the mower deck up as high as possible with steel straps, so it does not go up and down with the hitch and blade.  You can raise it much higher with a jack than you can with the hydraulics, then slip a steel strap with 9/16 holes at appropriate spacing on the end of the hinge pins to keep it there.  The rear center roller will still drag on things.

Brakes: The tractor needs brakes.  It is currently UNSAFE to stop on any kind of hill with the parking brake.  When you stop, stop the engine with the compression relief plunger and leave the tractor in gear.  Be sure to push the plunger back in and turn the mower off before attempting restart.

The 2 Hour Job:

• If there are leaves on the road, go down the West (Nofziger) side and up the east (Townsend) side with the mower on, to blow debris into the woods.  Turn the mower off after this step, so you don't shoot rocks.
• At the top of the hill, set the blade to 10 and 4 o'clock.
• Lower the blade and grade downhill on the left (east, Townsend) side to kick that dirt and gravel to the center.
• Raise the blade at the bottom of the hill, turn around, lower the blade, and cut uphill on the left (west, Nofziger) side, kicking all that dirt and gravel to the center.
• If you get stuck, raise the blade slightly until you dump just enough gravel to get moving again.  You could also try the low speed differential (tortoise/hare lever by your right calf), but I found the problem was traction, so super low gear didn't help.
• After 5 or 6 passes, the sides should be smooth and a large mound of gravel should be in the center of the road.
• To finish, reverse the blade and do a smoothing pass.  You can leave the hitch control lever in center position to reduce pressure on the blade.  You can also play with the blade straight across vs. angled.
• Before leaving the area, use a hoe to refresh any drainage features you may have filled in.  Try to pile dirt on the downhill side of such features to make little dams.

It's not rocket science.

Compaction would be best at this point, but it takes 4 hours to plate compact that hill and I did not do it this time.

The ditches are bad now because some gravel got in them and/or the outside edge of the blade made a gravel dam between the road and the ditches.  A little hoe work will be needed in the next good rain.

14Sep2017 Gravel and Compaction on Baer Hill

(written 23Oct2017, 5 weeks later)

On 14Sep2017 Ferguson delivered 14.25 tons of ABC.  He drove out from under it, starting at the top of Baer hill.  The gravel ran out just short of Anita's driveway, just over 500 feet.  It was concentrated in the center.  Without spreading the gravel out at all, I ran the compactor over it.  It took 3 hours to do the 500 feet.  The compactor ran out of gas once.

The delivery was sparked by complaints of washboarding.  Right after compaction, the road was much smoother.  Washboarding returned within 2 weeks, but there was very little gravel lost to car wheels.  There was no rain to speak of during that time.

Compactor Tips
The compactor should be started at idle and kicked up to full speed to compact. The manual says to change the throttle quickly.  At full speed, the compactor wants to crawl forward on level ground.  On Baer Hill, I worked in an oval pattern.

1. Straight across from west to east, with the compactor angled about 45 degrees uphill to hold its altitude.

2. Make a big loop back and uphill, going back over loose spots

3. Always turn to the right

4.  Overlap by 50%

Wear ear protection.

You can manage the compactor with one hand on level ground.

That's not a good way to do things, but it shows you don't need to use a lot of muscle, most of the time.

After compaction, there were still two low spots.  I filled them with buckets and compacted more, leaving small humps where the holes had been.  I also marked the spots with rocks in the weeds, to watch them change over time. 

In the 5 weeks between this work and the grading on 22Oct, the two spots behaved differently.
* The smaller downhill one became a hole again
* The larger uphill one kept its hump, but a new hole developed within a foot uphill of the compacted area.

If holes keep coming back in the same places, it may be that there are natural hard and soft places in Baer Hill road.

This view shows the difference between compacted and uncompacted areas on 14Sep:

02Sep2017: Waterbars at 4143 RTR

The day after all that hoe work in the rain, I improved two of the rain grooves into full fledged waterbars.  It took about 3 hours to do both features.

 This is after using the Merry Tiller to scarify the area.  Even though the road is very well compacted, the tiller easily dug to about 2 inch depth.  It is important to use a Merry Tiller here.  An ordinary garden tiller will hurt itself.  But with the Merry Tiller, you don't need a backhoe, nor a lot of pick and shovel work.

I'm a Merry Tiller fan.  The times are 1/8 inch steel and the double reduction chain drive gives you torque to turn up 6 inch rocks and 1 inch stumps.

At this point:

• All the loose tillage has been pulled downhill into a 4 inch tall mound with rake and hoe,
• The resulting hole has been filled with 10 gallons of 67 grade gravel.

67 (aka sixes and sevens) gravel has no fines, so it makes good drainage.  Water slips right through the gaps.

This is the view after compaction.  The mound is now about 2 inches.  It's a water bump, not a speed bump.  The gravel is packed tight to minimize dispersion by car tires and catching of bike tires.  Weak water flow from the left drops into the gravel and filters downhill into the ditch (up in the photo).  Strong water flow overshoots the gravel but pools behind the bump, and still flows into the ditch.

This is the one on RTR east side, diverting Shadowwood water into Fran's woods.

Followup 2021: This silted up and needed to be redug in a year.  Some people disliked the bump.  The whole idea became less important after that stretch was crowned with a box blade, purchased Jan2020.

02Sep2017: Pothole Repair on Shaddowwood

After the big rain on 01Sep2017, Shadowwood had a big puddle that I thought was or would become a pothole.  I used it to try out a few things like using rocks for fill and transporting the 200 plus pound plate compactor with the tractor.

This is how it looked at the start, and the tools I started with.  I may not use the pickaxe again.  It splashed me pretty bad, and kicked one rock right up into my lip.  Bad idea.

This shows the holes after digging out with the pickaxe.  Reference manuals call this "scarifying."  Supposedly the new fill grabs dug newly ground better than ground that's been smoothed over by car tires.  By now, most of the water that started out in the puddles is on me.

Flattish rocks are laid in the scarifiedd holes.  This is my innovation.  I think the large volume of the rocks may help reduce settling of the fill material over time.  If nothing else, they will provide a telltale if the fill washes out.

Here are two buckets of gravel in the holes.  The buckets are 5 gallons, with weep holes drilled into the bottoms.  The gravel is "ABC," aka "crusher run."  That means that it has the "fines," which means sand down to rock dust, particles that come out of the crusher that makes big rocks into little ones.  The fines make ABC into good fill for potholes etc.
 

After about 5 minutes with the plate compactor, the gravel is both tamped down and spread out a little.

This unusual rock placed on the western bank is a marker.  There is a 12 inch diameter hickory just out of frame to the left.

Done and dusted, with the plate compactor on the tractor lifts.  Total time: one hour.

01Sep2017: Ditching

This evening I spent about 90 minutes in the rain with a hoe, working on drainage from Reggae's to the power cut and partway down Pond road.  The cuts I made were shallow and temporary, but served to divert most of the rainwater off the roads.  It is easier to dig when it's raining.  The water softens the dirt and carries the diggings away.

We need to install real waterbars in the places I scratched grooves, and improve the ditches so water is not kicked into the wheel ruts.

It was too dark to take pictures at the time.  These photos were taken the next day on Red Tail Run:

This is Red Tail Run near Reggae's culvert, below the washout from earlier this year.  Water was running down the west wheel rut and making a big puddle in the road over the culvert.  This groove diverted water from the rut into the ditch.  It had to be here because the berm is low.  For most of this stretch of road, there is high ground between the wheel rut and the ditch.  In some places, the rut is actually lower than the ditch.  Water can only be diverted into the ditch in the places where the berm is low, or at the top.

The berm is too dense for compaction (tried it).  It could be cut down with a tractor and blade, but the ditch would need to be deepened in turn.  I think it's better long term to:

1. Build waterbars to divert the water in the two locations shown here.
2. Build the wheel ruts up with ABC gravel and the plate compactor.

This is the top of the same ditch, just below Jack&Lori's driveway.  Before July, no rainwater went into the ditch here.  Tractor work in July cut down the area between the blue lines about half the water went in the ditch.  But in the rain it was obvious that about half the water was overshooting and running down the wheel rut.  This groove and the little downhill bank diverted all the water from tis area into the ditch.  Water here is what comes down RTR from my house, and what comes down Jack&Lori's driveway.

West side of RTR near the trailhead, looking south.The tree blocks the original ditch, kicking water from the ditch into the wheel rut.  A little hoe work got the water back into the ditch on the downhill side.   I did this in several places on Baer Hill during the same storm, and watched the road drain off in real time.

Two rain grooves on Red Tail Run just below my driveway combined to  dry the road out down to Jack&Lori's.  The water here is mostly from Shadowwood.

These grooves were replaced by waterbars the next day.

26Aug2017: I Filled a Pothole!

This is the first real diary entry, not blogged to the Road Committee email list.

Last Saturday, I filled a pothole on ELG Road near the Mustys' transformer.  It took two 5-gal buckets of ABC (with fines) and I tamped it with a heavy dig bar.

Online sources say that the real problem is underground water.  I think it would be better to:

• dig the hole out a little
• put in a big rock
• then fill and tamp to road level

We'll see how that works out.

30Aug2017: The Road So Far

In 2013, the ELG Neighborhood formed a formal Pond Committee to tackle issues with our community pond.  The main work product of that committee is here:
http://gluelogix.com/ELG/Pond/

A subset of that information highlighting what to do year to year is here:
https://sites.google.com/site/elgmaintenance22/pond-water-quality-fish-and-weeds

In 2016, the ELG Neighborhood formed a formal Road Committee to tackle maintenance issues and build an online knowledge base for ourselves and future owners.  The ELG Road page is here:
https://sites.google.com/site/elgmaintenance22/elg-road-drainage

Other pages will be filled into the Google Site as we go.  More interaction can be had by joining the Google Group:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/elg-maintenance

In 2017 I bought an early 80's Kubota B5200 tractor with a belly mower, and a new rear blade, for road maintenance.  The tractor was used on Craigslist, $2500 plus rollback fee.  The blade was $350 at Tractor Supply.  I've got about $4000 total invested in other things that are useful to me too, but I would probably not have spent the money if they were not also useful to ELG.

Here is a summary of my emails to the Road Committee up to now:

14Jun2017: Tractor broke during roadside mowing.  Mowing would have been 4 hours if the steering knuckle had not snapped.  I later upped that to 6 hours.  That can be an annual thing to keep brush down.  It also knocks back the bamboo grass so people can see the shoulder and know if it is safe to pull off in a given location, to let someone else by.
http://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/parts-repairs/381143-cant-get-steering-knuckle-off.html

15Jun2017: I relayed this information from Mark Robinsson, who worked withScott a bit on teh roads and picked some things up:

We should look for dead, diseased trees by the side of the road - pines included.
At some point we may want to take out 2 trees near the mailboxes, not because they are dead but they are close to the road and of course, growing. It seems prudent to stay on top of impediments to navigation by emergency vehicles.

Maples and oaks are particularly susceptible to uprooting when we have heavy rain and wind. The surface roots lose holding power and the heavy top of the tree creates the torque, If those trees are healthy and not right next to the road we are likely fine.

There are too many variables to know when a tree will go, but if we err on safe than sorry, I suspect we will be fine. The irony is that when you remove a tree from the canopy, you expose the other trees more, and for a few years those trees are more susceptible to wind. 

24Jun2017: Posted documentation pics of Red Tail Run in the rain:
http://gluelogix.com/ELG/Roads/RoadDamage2017/

28Jun2017: Sent this letter to the main ELG board on behalf of the Road Committee:

Dear ELG neighbors -

With all the rain recently, there is a bad washout in Red Tail Run near Reggae's driveway.  Please go slow there while we sort that out.

The other big road issue is looming culvert blockage on ELG Road. Before the culverts can be maintained, the brush must be cleared.  Trace has gotten some estimates for roadside brush clearing.  His guy Mark Eide says 4 days with a pole saw, at $500/day, will clear all the brush from ELG roadsides, out 8 feet from the end of the gravel, including ditches.  Doing this is important for:
* visibility while driving,
* to keep the ditches from clogging with roots and leaves,
* and to prevent the brush from growing large enough to damage fire trucks.

Cut brush will be thrown back into the woods at least 10 feet from the gravel's edge.

The road Committee is requesting funding for half of that work from the ELG Officers.  We propose to spend $1000 to have Mark Eide clear brush as described on ELG Road in early August.  That's $38.50 per tract, or about 20% of our average budget.

Once the brush is cleared from the ELG Road ditches, we will be able to see what needs to be done about silting of the culverts on that road. If there is interest among neighbors in continuing that work ourselves, we can save some cash and keep dues down for a while longer.

We think the brush on Baer Hill road is a problem too, especially on the sharp corner by the power cut, but it's not as dense there and can be handled by a combination of individual owner efforts and cooperative work days.  ELG Road is overgrown badly enough that we think we need a one time expense to get it to a maintainable state.

If there are serious objections to this expense in ELG, please air them on this list, and come help us figure out a better way.  The current road committee membership is Trace, Larry, Jack, and Tracie Little.

Thanks,

The Road Committee 

02Jul2017: 4 hours tractor work, Rosendo driving:

Today, Rosendo drove my tractor for 3 hours, working on drainage for Red Tail Run.  He cut a shallow trench uphill of Jack&Lori's driveway and a deeper one on their side of ELG, just downhill.  I will bill Gail for the $180 tractor time, including $75 for Rosendo.  I watched him closely and did a little digging etc., myself.  We used no new gravel today.

Yesterday, Trace weed-whacked the sides of Red Tail run from Jack & Lori's to Reggae's driveways.  He may have gone further, I didn't look. He also worked on digging a channel for water puddling above Reggae's culvert to flow into the woods, so the road does not continue to soften there.

I hand dug a new drainage feature on the west side of Red Tail Run, meant to be a model for waterbars if it works out.  I also rented a soil compactor and used it to compact the bottom of the new drain as well as compacting gravel into the washout groove.  I used 10 buckets of gravel, or $20 to ELG.  I ended up with 5 gallon buckets filled to within 2 inches of the top, so each bucket is about 4.5 gallons and weighs about 40 pounds.

The soil compactor was an experiment I'm not sure about.  It was very hard to manage on the hill.  On flat ground, it ran like a floor buffer, but on the hill it was a beast.  I think I may tie it off with a rope if I have to use it on a hill again.  It did pack the gravel into the washout crease and it did make a nicely graded floor for the drain.  It did not compact down the raised shoulder on Red Tail Run below the new drain.  Rosendo thinks we have to cut that down.

Regarding the tractor, I have to figure out a quick way to get the mower on and off, and to get control of the blade tilt.  There is a turnbuckle for the latter but it's frozen.  Rosendo is used to using a blade with builtin tilt, but those are over $1000.  Mine with just one axis was almost $400.  So I have to figure out a way to control the tilt at the hitch.  I'm also thinking about unbolting the replaceable edge and replacing it with something shorter across that goes down further.

Rosendo says I got the wrong kind of gravel for pothole work, so I will be ordering a second pile of ABCs, which I will cover so the sand doesn't wash away, and keep the same per-bucket arrangement with ELG if that works for everyone.  I'll also get a store of pavers from Adams on Lasalle in Durham and sell them on to ELG for a little more than my cost to cover my time and gas. 

18Jun2017: Plan for Baer Hill Road washboarding:

Dear Road Committee -

As Trace noted to me last week, Baer Hill has started washboarding. Scott's practice has been to grade down the high spots, and/or apply more gravel.  I want to try something different.

I have ordered another pile of gravel from Ferguson, this time ABCs (smaller chunks with sand and rock dust).  I think we can build up the low spots with ABC material and a plate compactor like the one I rented a few weeks ago.  I want to try and get out there Saturday morning before it gets hot.  I might not make it if I can't get the new machine working by then.

This is the compactor I bought:
http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200671386_200671386

Amortized over 100 hours, I think it's fair to rent it to ELG at $5/hr. That gives me incentive to keep it greased and gassed.  My time is no charge.  I think I will keep doing it that way, for a while at least.

Does that work for the Road Committee?

In other news I went out after tonight's rain and looked at our recent work on Red Tail Run.  Rosendo's long sweeping waterbar is working ok. The area between Jack&Lori and Reggae's drives is improved but still needs work.  Only about half the water is going in the ditch.  That's an improvement from before, when none of the water was going in the ditch and it all ran down the wheel rut.  The funny thing is, where I compacted 67 gravel into the washout, the water is still flowing through the gravel.  A lot of dirt is in the runoff water, so we really have to be careful about erosion as we learn what we're doing.  That's another argument for additive vs. subtractive maintenance.  Here are pictures:

http://gluelogix.com/ELG/Roads/RoadDamage2017/07_July/

On Sunday I recorded a "before picture" of ELG Road.  It's a little shaky but I think adequate for documentation.  I'll repeat after Mark Eide goes through.  A "small" version (33 MB) is here:

http://gluelogix.com/ELG/Roads/ElgRoadBrush2017/Before/

As a datapoint for road maintenance services, a guy who does some work for me says he got an estimate for reconditioning his driveway.  New gravel, compacted with a big machine, then graded and ditched.  $1600 for a 300 foot driveway.  We have about 2 miles of road or 10,000 feet. 

05Aug2017: Plan for culverts:

Road Committee -

Now that the brush is out of the way, we need to do something with the drainage, since that's ostensibly why we got the brush cut.  I'm taking more walks over there, and have started this page to get some facts behind our decision making:

https://sites.google.com/site/elgmaintenance22/elg-road-drainage

The page points to still photos on imgur and videos on youtube.  It contains an image adapted from orange county online GIS.

After a couple of inspection walks, the ELG road ditches mostly look ok to me.  I'd have to see them when it's pouring rain to be sure, but they don't seem to be clogged by brush, weeds, or even a lot of leaves in most places.  I think we can put out an appeal for owners to rake their own ditches for the common good, and I can clean up whatever doesn't happen that way on my walks.

The culverts are another story.  The ones under ELG road look ok, except the one at Tracie's end, where the runoff is blocked by a log so there is no flow:
http://imgur.com/a/BqZcg

If we wanted to be very proactive, we could pick sticks from the north side of ELG road and carry them to the south side so they don't wash into the big culverts at Rusty's.  But that's a little crazy.

I think the work for us is in the driveway culverts.  Many of the driveway culverts are at least half blocked.  Some of those may be nonfunctional anyway, with enough alternate water pathways to prevent road flooding.  The driveway culverts all down the south side of ELG road fit this description.  They are completely blocked, and look like they have been so for some time.  To me that means that we would have heard of flooding if it were going to happen.

The culverts on the north side of ELG road, in Audrey's driveways at 4401/3 ELG and the unmarked driveway east of that, look like they are just getting blocked.  Tracie says she has seen flooding there over the years.  So let's talk about clearing them:
http://imgur.com/a/awEke

In 2015 we got a quote of $1000  from Mister Rooter to clear the culvert at Jack&Lori's driveway.  All they had was a 5000 PSI pressure washer with a sewer tip.  The tips are standard and cheap enough at Amazon.  The washer rents for $285/day at Sunbelt in Durham.  They are closed Sunday so you pick up Saturday morning and drop off Monday morning for one day charge, as long as you put less than 8 hours on the counter.
https://www.sunbeltrentals.com/equipment/detail/1286/0160410/5000psi-gas-cold-water-pressure-washer/

The price goes down fast with lower pressure units.  We may get off cheaper.  I need to organize the tips and a big water tank, then I will try it out on my own culvert, on my own dime.  If it works and the Committee approves, we can start doing it on ELG money for Audrey's and Tracie's.  In the meantime, Tracie may be able to organize somebody to cut that log away and restore drainage flow to the culvert at 4433 ELG, mentioned above.

Sound like a plan?
Larry

P.S. If we do eventually need day labor, we have Rosendo.  If he is not interested in ditch work, he may be able to recommend somebody. Audrey says she knows somebody who's back in town this month.  Lori says she happens to know that immigrant laborers congregate at a convenience mart on Jones Ferry Road near 54.  I'd say that would be our last resort. 

26Aug2017: Tried out pressure washer on a culvert:

Title: 4000 PSI pressure washer cleans culverts

Body: But you need a face shield or at least goggles. 

Dear Road Committee, plus Dick and Rusty:

Today I did a proof of concept using a rented 4000 PSI pressure washer to clean out a culvert around back of my property on Shadowwood.  It looks good to me, and I think we can start planning to do it on ELG Road.

It took about an hour to set up, an hour to clean the culvert and ditch a little downhill, and an hour to clean up.  The "one day" rental from Saturday to Monday morning (before 08:30 with <8 hours on the clock) is just under $200 with accessories and insurance:

https://www.sunbeltrentals.com/equipment/detail/1286/0160310/4000psi-gas-cold-water-pressure-washer/#
https://youtu.be/l1Co4_tJMnU
https://youtu.be/JdmMs_Yrmac
http://imgur.com/a/ho3x5
It uses a lot of water.  It takes a garden hose as input and has no reservoir.  I have 200 feet of hose.  We'll need more hose to get to the houses near the culverts, and their cooperation to hook to their hose bibs.  I guess somebody needs to get with Audrey about it, when we figure out when we want to go.  If we can't get hoses, Sunbelt also rents water trailers for $250, same timespan.

Jamie&Katherine and Kim&Wade also have clogged driveway culverts but my intuition is that they are not really blocking any water that wants to flow.  It looks to me like they have been clogged for a long time.

It splashes, so we should go while it's still fairly warm out.  Who's up?

Larry

P.S. Just to confirm, per our arrangement this one is on my dime.  I will bill ELG for the machine rental when we do it on ELG Road. 

Getting Started

This blog is meant to be a maintenance history for the ELG Neighborhood in Efland NC.

Regrettably, in 2017 I took over responsibility for ELG roads and common areas from Scott Bertram.  Scott was a force of nature who helped build ELG and maintained it single handedly for 40 years.  But he's gone now, God bless him, and the rest of us have to figure some things out.  Even if we hire all the work out, we need to know what the work entails so we don't get killed money-wise.

I am setting up some related online services that will eventually become a procedure book for future owners of properties in ELG:

https://sites.google.com/site/elgmaintenance22/home
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/elg-maintenance

But this blog will be my diary and the best primary source for future ELG maintainers.