Grinding Iced Drive

[trlong]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( <font color="blue"> You won't see that in the city!!! </font> )</font>

You've got that right, at least very infrequent.

Most of the time when I mow, I do some for the neighbors too. With 5' of mower, it's no big deal for me to help a few neighbors. I have a few elderly neighbors I always try to blow snow for too. Had a guy in his eighties, leaning on his snowblower last year, looking like he was going to have a heart attack. I talked him into going into the house. Then I went home and drove back with the tractor and blower. He tried to pay. I just said I'm hoping some one will do the same for me when I'm eighty. I'm fighting the mentallity of our area turning into a commuting bedroom community.

 

[trlong]

The big harrow going down the road would have been a great pic. With a lot of rain coming in tonight, then changing to snow by tomorrow night, hopefully it won't get that bad around here. I'm hoping the ice gets mostly melted before temps drop again.

 

[trlong]

Yup Larry,

See above. 600' of driveway and I ran out of ashes quickly. Unless they're hot coals, black body does no good w/o sun. Today's the 1st day with sun for nearly a week and the sun angle is pretty low this time of year. I used to have a neighbor who burned coal. Coal ash will give traction, with or without melting the ice. Wish he were still around.

 

[scott_vt]

Hi Tom,
Yeah, that kind of ice when it gets slippery is deadly when you have an incline /forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif

Any chance you could rig that 3pt log splitter up to use as a jack hammer /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif OK just kidding /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif

scotty

 

[Deerlope]

I parked my truck yesterday on that kind of ice and 2 hours later it had slide 2 feet from the wheel track, by itself.

 

[whoodle]

I have a 1700 foot drive with 23% grades. I keep it scraped clean to avoid snow buildup, and I use straight salt in a hand spreader when it gets ugly. I generally use about 3 to 15 50-85lb bags a year, about $5 a bag at OliverSeed.

 

[Paddy]

ICE.

I live at the end of a 600' gravel hilly lane. When I've cleared the best I can with a grader blade and it's down to the 1" of ice... I put down sand. The critical issue most people over look is how much sand and where. On hills I take a bag of sand and walk up the hill and place a good 10 to 15 ' traction spot. (both sides!) leaving 20 to 30' of ice between. This will take you from 'spot to spot' with a bit of speed.

I can hit my hills with 2-3 bags of sand. It takes very little sand to give traction. Don't worry about melting ice, traction on top is what you want.

20 years on an icey drive
patrick

 

[daTeacha]

</font><font color="blueclass=small">(
I don't ask for anything but usually they will offer to pay. I just tell them to keep their money, afterall, I might need some help with something someday. It pays off to be neighborly in the long run. )</font>

Even if not directly, it sure makes folks think better of one another. And even if you don't see your reward in this word, you'll be driving the tractor of your dreams in the next one!

I'll see what I can do about posting some pics here this weekend of my little forkbar. I need to look into how to attach pics, and take some, too. I just looked and it seems pretty simple here. Another site I visit requires you to post them to a photo hosting site then bring the URL to your post in the thread, which is a bit of a pain for a guy who doesn't use a photo hosting site regularly. I presume I better use small size, low resolution, and it seems like only one photo per post, so I can run up my post count in a hurry! /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif

 

[scesnick]

I have never tried using sand. I would imagine it is mostly for traction and not so much for its melting ability. Our farm, where I recently built a new log home, has been in our family for close to 100 years and I was always told to never put salt on the road.
My grandfather and father always said that "it will take the bottom right out of the road" I'm assuming they mean that since it is a mostly dirt and very little gravel that it will take away its strength in the spring and become a 6 inch deep mud trail.
Any thoughts on this theory?

 

[daTeacha]

This is pure speculation bolstered with a few scientific facts.

Salt works to melt ice by going into solution with the H2O, forming saltwater. The thing most people don't think about is the fact that the melting of the ice is accompanied by a lowering of the temperature. If you doubt it, think about a homemade ice cream maker. You add salt to the ice to lower the temperature to 0 F. BTW, that's part of the basis for the Fahrenheit scale and the lowest temperature easily attained in the laboratory at the time.

Anyways, getting back to your grandfather's comment, the melted saltwater will tend to percolate it's way down through the driveway or road if it's all dirt, taking the "frost" out of the ground as it goes. The driveway will soften ahead of the rest of the ground, leading to the soupy messy to which you refer.

Personally, I tend to avoid salt on my driveway because all that salt can't be doing the plants any good. On roadways, it gets carried off with the spring melt by the roadside ditches, but there is still some environmental impact from the salty dust and saltwater to the roadside vegetation. I just avoid it if I can. I'll use it when nothing else works or we have infirm parents coming to visit, but not much and not often.