TAR SPRAYING BY ROAD MACHINE.
Page 19
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
The Experience of the Surrey County Council. Comparative Costs.
MOST of the reads are now receiving 1'1 their annual coating of tar. Tar splaying, as it is called, appears at present to be the most popular and most practicable way of .allaying the dust nuisance. Not only does it do this, but it preserves the surface of the highway. The county .councils have all ,sorts of methods of giving the highways their coating of tar. Some are slow, expensive and cumbersome, and one wonders why more efficient apparatus is not adopted. For some years now, the Sur' rey County Council .shave been using an up-to-date machine) the invention of a =Mr. F. G. Barnes. an engineer at Godalming: It is drawn by a steam tractor and fitted with steam radiators, which make and keep the tar hot. These radiators draw their steam from the tractor, and, thus, the immense. tank, "holding 1,000 gallons of tar, allows a constant flow of tar; piping' hot, to be spread over thei surface of the highway. The brushes attached to the rear of the tank distribute the tar thoroughly. Gravel is immediately thrown over, so that the traffic on the road is not inconvenienced in any way. The contents of the tank-1,000 gallons—fast about an haw, and the machine does best an old road surfaces and roads, of even widish.
Mr. T. E. Ware, the Epsom surveyor of highways, who first used tar in 1994 on the Portsmouth road, states that new surfaces are better tarred by hand, as more time can be given to cleaning off the fine dust before the tar is applied.
The Surrey County Council's machine is capable of tarring 10,000 super. yards of roadway hi one day of eight hours, or, to put it in another way, the Portsmouth road from Cobham to Ripley, a distance of nearly four miles, can be. done in three days. With the previous system of hand labour and antiquated appliances.
it took three weeks.
Mr., Ware further states that the average cost last year of tarring by Barnes's patent machine was 2s. 2d. per super yard,.' and by hand labour 5d. The Surrey County Council have about a dozen of these useful machines at present operating in various parts of the county,' and, before the Epsom race meeting, they were extensively used round Epsom. This photograph was takenon the Portsmouth road at Street Cobham, where, in 1904, as before 'stated, Mr. , Ware carried out his first experiment of using tar to alleviate the dust nuisance. Later, it was found what a capital road preservativetar was and is. And this put an end to the' use of oil, then called I'Vestrumite,” which, for a timo, was suggested to be a good dust layer and better than tar.