You'll find tips for slashing heating bills, growing fresh, natural produce at home, and more. That's why we want you to save money and trees by subscribing through our earth-friendly automatic renewal savings plan.
Reader Contribution By Grace Campbell. Tags: gravel driveways , driveway maintenance , home improvement , Vermont , Grace Campbell ,. Share your thoughts. Mary Bittle. Herb E-Book Projects Collection. Add to cart. Earth-Sheltered Home Blueprint.
E-Plan, Windcrafter Turbine. Soap Maker's Workshop. The New Livestock Farmer. Aquaponic Gardening. Related Content. This text can be changed. Join Today! Already a Member? These suggestions will help you deal with a bad stretch of road.
Air down the tires. The softer tires will give you a better grip of the road and provide more cushion. Hard tires create wash boarding faster as well. Put your vehicle in 4WD HI. This will help you deal with sliding and skidding. Wash board has a similar effect on the vehicle. While in 4WD HI you can power up and turn into the slide a little bit to pull the vehicle out of a slide.
That will help you maintain control of your vehicle. The conventional brakes work better in loose material. Leave the cruise control off too. That could be the shoulder, the opposite of the road or even a berm along the side. Having even one set of wheels on a smooth surface can make a big difference, but watch for rocks, dips, and other hazards.
The biggest risk is that every now and then you run out of bank and end up in a ditch. Slow down, and watch the road carefully. As you know, driving on any loose surface requires extra caution. You may think that because you have large, wide tires you have unlimited traction. No so. Just like with snow, gravel offers serious challenges, especially at higher speeds. Inspect your vehicle before and after the trip for any loose parts, especially relating to the suspension system.
Slow down. Wait until you are moving very slowly before you steer back onto the roadway. Most people drive right down the middle of the gravel roads. That means on coming traffic is right in the middle of the road too. Be alert for oncoming traffic and other hazards. Get over to your side of the road as you approach a curve or hill. A trip out in the country can be one of the more enjoyable ways to spend an afternoon. Knowing how to drive on unpaved roads will help keep it that way.
Nice info on the wash boarding effect. I have usually picked up the speed to help minimize the effect or tried to find a smoother spot in the road. But how does washboard become whoop-de-doos?
And how come the ridges go all the way across the road in a fairly straight line? How does the right end know what the left end is doing? Your email address will not be published.
Post comment. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. As you can imagine, driving over a deeply ridged surface is annoying and also a little dangerous, due to the reduced contact and control.
When the washboard becomes bad, the only solution is to bring in a grader and scrape the road smooth again. A group of researchers Nicolas Taberlet, Stephen Morris and Jim McElwaine took interest in the underlying physics of the washboard effect and have put together a summary of the results of their investigation. They were pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to recreate the phenomenon under laboratory conditions:.
Using our experimental setup, we were able to obtain washboard roads for wide variety of parameters. Ripples were seen for dry or wet sand, with fine or coarse grains, using long-grain rice or beach sand, with an added spring, for various weights of the wheel and for a large range of speeds.
This shows that the phenomenon is very robust i. In fact, similar phenomena exist on rail tracks and on ski slopes.
0コメント