I don't want to hijack the tread, but here I go anyway. I know what products your referring to, but its the woven fabric I was referring to. Very similar to the cheap blue tarps, obviously much stronger.
I'm not an engineer but in my younger life I built many subdivisions and other service roads. Most of the roads into these places are built in the areas where the dirt is the worst and the terrain is either swampy or very hilly with many cut and fill sections. They need to keep the more desirable land areas for houses or other building they are building the road to.
You can build a road over any thing if you have enough money to spend. The material you are referring to is a good product and does a good job in areas that are wet due to poor drainage or because the soil holds a lot of moisture. This stuff really shines in areas that are damp and have relatively flat topo. When the right away clearing is done and the top soil is removed from the road way and you are at or near finish or sub grade and the dirt left is still not stable enough to get compaction for a road bed. On a site like this where you don't have a lot of cut areas with access to enough good suitable fill material where you can cut out 2 or three feet of the undesirable soil and fill it back in with good compactable dirt from the cut areas.
Here you just cut out a couple feet of the the unsuitable soil and lay down the fabric and bridge over it with large clean stone up to within 8 to 12 inches of finish grade and then fill the rest with a stone/dust material like crusher run to seal off the surface.
If you are a contractor with access to the equipment, materials and the money to build a private drive this way you can end up with a heck of a nice drive way. But most people don't have this luxury and have to resort to the old way of doing things and use what they have access to.
My drive way is 1500 feet long and the first 900 feet was through the worst material known to man. The first 30 feet was the worst because I didn't have anywhere to work and it was heavily wooded. On top of that I only had a 70' easement and pizzed off neighbors on both sides because I bought this piece of property before they could steal it. I had to be real careful not to disturb 1 inch on either side of me. The dirt didn't look that bad, it was damp but looked solid so I got a 955 Cat from an old friend and started to clear out a spot where I could lay a culvert pipe so I could get off the main road. I pushed over a couple trees then cut them up in small pieces so I could get them out of the way and laid the pipe. I remember thinking, this ain't going to be too bad.:laughing: Then I ordered a load of stone to cover the pipe and get some stone over what I had already disturbed. The truck got there and I had him back up to the pipe and dump some so I could work the stone over the pipe and pack it down some and once I had about a foot of packed stone over the pipe I let him back in over it and dump the rest in a pile on the side. I sent the truck back to get a load of #3's and while he was gone I figured I could cut out a foot or two of the soft dirt and fill it in with the big rock at the road because there would be a lot of pressure on that area with all the big heavy trucks turning into the drive there that would be coming in and out while I was building my house.
Everything was going well and I had a spot about 15' long and 20 foot wide cut out and I was sitting there on the loader waiting for the truck to come back when I noticed water just appear out of nowhere in the area I had cut out. No problem I thought and when the truck rolled back in I went out in the road to direct traffic so he could back in to dump his load. I had told him before not to back in too far just to where his back tandum wheel was over the pipe and dump the whole load in a pile but I got up on the running board and told him again not to back any farther than just to the pipe but this John Wayne, rambo sun of a gun decided he would show the world just how bad that old Louisville Ford really was and tried to back all the way in and as his front tandum cleared the pipe all the weight shifted and the ends of the pipe popped out of the ground and as he poured the coal on the old girl the back end went out of sight and came to a screaming halt with the tailgate half covered up in mud. He couldn't even dump the load and the first thing he did was jump out of the truck and yell that
I needed to call a wrecker. I was so mad I was afraid what would have happened if I had said anything at that point so I just went over, got on the loader and tried to figure a way to get him out without tearing off something on his big shiny truck. Not that I really cared at that point but I'm a pretty nice guy most of the time so I just kept my mouth shut and surveyed the situation. Pulling him out with the loader was out of the question because I didn't want to tear up the highway so pushing was the only way. I dug out a spot at the back of the tailgate enough to where it would open so he could dump some of the load to get some weight off the truck but the more I scooped out the more water came rolling in and then I felt that awful feeling, you know that feeling when the tracks under you slip ever so lightly and you know you are already stuck but don't know it yet. I tried to work my way back ever so lightly but the loader was not going anywhere and what was worst I couldn't even use the bucket to help move me backwards because the truck was right there. By now the truck front wheels were off the ground, the back end of the truck was buried to the top of the tailgate, the loader bucket was completely buried in the mud with the rear tracks sticking out into the air. I could step off the loader from the operators seat level onto the ground. I motioned to the driver to get out of the truck and come over to where I was standing and when he got there I quietly told him that I think he may need a wrecker if he had plans to make anymore loads for the day. He got all defensive and yelled that It was my responsibility if he got stuck and it was about then that I started to feel the hair start to stand up on the back of my neck and I told him it probably would be better if he got back into his truck and called his boss before something bad happened to him and he came at me and just as I was dragging the track shovel from behind the seat the cops rolled up and saved him from a terrible fate. They called a wrecker...a really big one and got the truck out once he was out of the way I got the loader out and then the mexican standoff began. The wrecker man wanted to get paid and everyone was pointing the finger at everyone else when the truck drivers boss man showed up. The driver told his side then I told mine the boss man paid the wrecker dude and the truck driver walked off quietly into the sunset after being fired on the spot.
The next day I ordered more stone after fixing the driveway pipe and I dumped 8 big loads of large stone and still couldn't get a truck backed all the way off the road before it became mired up to the axles so I scrapped the idea and decided to clean up the rest of the right away while I had time to think about what to do next because I only had the loader for a few days and needed to get as much as I could get done with the time I had left.
Once the road way was cleared of all the stumps and trees and the top dirt removed I could get back to the entrance to try and figure out what I could salvage. I pushed as much of the gravel that the trucks dumped in that one area as far forward as I could without making any more of a mess than possible and by then I had stone mixed with mud on about 40' of the road, you just couldn't drive on it.
I had built a couple roads through a swamp one time for a hunt club and they had this huge pile of broken cinder blocks we used to build up and bridge over stumps, logs and in some places just plain water 3' deep. Those things really worked well and it really didn't take many of them to be able to back a loaded truck over them and keep going until you got to the other side of what ever you was trying to get through. One place we went across over 1/2 a mile of beaver pond swamp where the water was 4 or 5 feet deep in some places using just broken cinder block. I made the road one summer and they used it that next hunting season and the next summer went back and filled in some of the sunken in spots then covered the whole thing with bank gravel about 6" to 10" deep and once it was leveled out, watered lightly and packed down from driving back and forth on it while we were working on the road it was all as hard as a rock. I would go back there every couple years and spread a little bank gravel on the low spots and one time the beavers had really been working hard and built some new dams and that one section across the swamp was 2 feet under water. I broke out a section of the dam and drained it off and once the water drained off the road was still in good shape. That sandy bank gravel held up very well and all I had to do is put a thin layer on the surface smooth it off and it was good as new. Well, of-course we had to do some trapping of the eager beavers in the area and move them to another part of the county but no harm no foul. I guess they are still using those roads today. About 10 years after we first put them in they used them as logging roads to haul out 1700 ac of timber and pulp wood off of one piece of inaccessible land on the back side of that property. They widened them a little and covered them with grey stone from a nearby quarry while they were cutting in there.
Anyway I remembered using these broken blocks so I went to the nearby block plant to see if they were still giving them away as waste which they were and I hired one truck to haul them in as I worked them into the mud with the loader. Those things will hold up a loaded truck with no problem and after 5 loads I was already back to the place where I had spread the loads of #3's and by the second day I had a good layer all the way through the lower area and was now headed uphill to the home site. I went ahead and laid down a good 1' layer all the way to the house. It was h@ll to drive on for awhile but awhile later I bought me a small single axle dump truck so I could haul my own material when I had time and the money to do so. We had a sand and gravel company close by and they would let me drive down into the pit to get the material right out of the pit for $1.25 a ton and this was about the same stuff I had dug out of the bank to build those roads at that hunt club. It was mostly river rock that was from pea gravel sized to rocks over 8" mixed with a fine clay and sand mixture that would pack so hard you couldn't drive a pick into it. I hauled in a few more loads of cinder block to build up a few areas then covered the whole thing with a foot of this pit material and I never put any crushed stone on it for years. After about 8 years it had a few pot holes that came up after we had a really cold wet winter and I used my ol 8" H beam/ drag to smooth it out a little then covered it with and thin layer of crush a run and that is all that has been done to my road for over 18 years now. I'll drag it once a year to smooth out a few wrinkles and I'm good to go.
Dang! sorry I got carried away.:drink:
