Connecticut western news., 1908-04-02
HINTS
 0N ROAD MAKING

OII IIOIlD lulIuNIuN USE OF FLOW, sCRAPER AND DRAG The United States Office of Public
 Roads Contributes to The News
 an Article on the Construction and
 Maintenance of Model Earth Roads.
 While American road builders are as capable of constructing good roads as those of any country of the old world they have not been as loyally supported as the men of those countries in main taining the highways after completion and the deplorable state of many hun dred miles of road is thus accounted for. County and township officials may at the outset stand the expenses of having road built, but they strenuously object when asked to provide funds to rebuild the road that has been allowed to go to ruin. t>
 It is important that farmers learn of the benefits to be der1ved from good earth roads; chat county boards be i'm pressed with the need of proper main tenance of the same, and that road builders and overseers learn how best to care for the roads in their charge.
 The persistent and powerful enemies of earth roads are water and narrow tires, and the constant effort of the men in charge of the roads should be to guard against their destructive effects and remedy all damage as quickly as possible. The simple implements which have been found to be of greatest assistance ill this work are the blow, the drag scraper, the wheel scraper, the road grader and the split-log drag.
 With sandy soil and subsoil of clay, or clay.and gravel, deep blowing, so as to raise and mix the clay with the sur face soil and sand, will prove beneficial. The combination forms sand clay road at a trifing expense. On the other hand if the road be entirely of sand a mistake will be made if it is plowed unless clay can be added. Such blowing would merely deepen the sand, and at the same time break up the small amount, of hard surface material which may have formed. If the subsoll is clay and the surface scant in sand or gravel, blowing should not be resorted to as it would result Tn a clay surface rather than one of sand or gravel. A road foreman must know not only what to blow and what not to blow, but how and when to blow. If the road is of the kind which according to the above instructions should be plowed over it's whole width, the best method is to run the first furrow in the middle of the road and work out to the sides, thus l forming a crown. Results from such blowing are greatest in the spring or early summer. .. l In ditches blow can be used to good advantage, but should be followed by a scraper or grader, To make wide, deep ditches nothing better than the ordinary drag scraper has yet been devised. For hauls under 100 feet. or in making fills it is especially serviceable. It is a mistake, however, to attempt to handle l long haul material with this scraper, as the wheel scraper is better adapted to such work. For hauls of more than 800 feet, wagon should be used.
 The machine most generally used in road work is the grader, or road machine This machine is especially useful in smoothing and crowning the road and ill opening ditches. A clay subsoil under a thin coating of soil should not be dis turbed with grader. It is also 8 mis- take to use grader indiscriminately and to pull material from ditches upon a sand. clay road. Not infrequently turf, soil and silt from ditch bottoms are piled in the middle of the road in a ridge making mudholes certainty. It is i'm portant in using grader to avoid build ing up the road too much at one time. A road gradually built up by frequent use of the grader will last better than if completed at one operation. The fore man frequently thinks his road must be high in the first instance. He piles up material from 10 inches to a foot in depth only to learn, with the arrival of the first rain, that he has furnished ma terial fer as many inches of mud. All material should be brought up in thin layers each layer we'll puddled and firmly packed by roller or traffic before the next is added. A common mistake is to crown too high with road machine on a narrow road.
 The split log drag should be used to fill in ruts and smooth the road when not too badly washed. The drag pos