Neighborhood thugs go to war with the road department

oh [Music] it's like 50 years old so it doesn't like getting up in the morning [Music] that's two cylinders there's all three it fires on one sputters on two for a little bit and then when all three kick in you can finally let it sit and warm up okay so now we're getting the tractor topped off we got our sure can here and we just vice grip the handle down and just let it go there's a fine line between lazy and efficient i mean i don't know which side i'm on but there is definitely a line [Music] all right let's get going i guess i don't have to yell the camera is over there but the mic is right here actually i'm not deal or not this is kind of loud we'll figure it out together so first thing we're going to do is go over here and drop off the forks that are on the bucket behind you to do that we raise you up we drop the forks and now there you are we head down the road [Laughter] hold on i forgot some stuff looks like we're late to the party grumpy's already out here so as some of you may know i live on a dirt road what you may not know is this dirt road is part of a road district and there's 12 miles of dirt road in this district and of those 12 miles our stretch from where it meets the paved road way off over there all the way down to grumpy's house our other neighbors my house over here and off a little ways is the best stretch of dirt road in the district and the reason it's in such good shape or was because that guy right there named grumpy has been maintaining it since back when this was a horse and buggy trail maybe not quite that old but it's pretty close uh grumpy from the whole time he's lived out here has been using his own tractor with his own fuel and maintaining this road and he has also been buying his own rock out of his own pocket and putting on this road to keep it rocked because the road district hasn't touched this road in according to grumpy about 12 years since i moved out here and got my little tractor i've been helping grumpy maintain it we come out here together and we grade the road and blade it smooth and fix up all the rock and keep it in good shape so it has been the best road in the district until now our road district board members have decided they're going to redo all the roads in the district even though they don't have the money to they did all the research came up with all the numbers figure out what's going to cost look their budget realized they don't have anywhere near the money but they're going to do it anyway so our road had a very good solid base hard as a rock was very smooth and had good gravel on it because this guy keeps buying gravel and putting on it that was until last week when some dump trucks started showing up and dumping dirt right over the top of the gravel this is all now through this section here a little over a foot of fill dirt brought in and put over the top of everything and some guy came out with a tractor and box scraper and did a horrible job of leveling it and then they tell us oh don't worry we're going to put rock over the top of it so i say are you going to grade it first and compact it they say oh our guy graded it and the car is driving over it until we get the rock down that'll be the compaction so in addition to all the other jobs i've had and have dirt work and excavation road building is one of them so i know that's not how it works what happens when you do that they put down very dry dirt no compaction very rough grading say when they put the rock over the top they'll smooth out the rock well when you have a big low spot here and a big high spot there and you smooth it out with rock you end up with very thick rock here and very thin rock there this thick rock will chew out that thin rock will go away and then you have rough road and mud the other problem is when you put in over a foot of dry filter and don't compact it put rock over the top of it right before winter as soon as the ground gets saturated that rock pushes down into the dirt so all the rock you put on top will disappear down into the dirt and you'll be left with mud on top the problem is our road was just fine there was nothing wrong with it until they dumped all this dirt on it look at this big hump here dives off into a big old hole right here look at this dips down right here goes back up this was all perfectly smooth before way higher on this side than it is on this side and if we go down to the other end it just gets worse and worse so grumpy and i are out here grading the road at least we can get it graded smooth before they put the rock on it that way the rock is a nice even layer all the way through we can't do much about the compaction because we don't have any compactors uh but at least we can have a smooth road until the rock disappears so i was telling them that your name of grumpy is very ironic and tell someone until someone messes with your road then it's very fitting so we're to get it fixed grumpy doesn't want to talk he's mad just wants to work so you can see their grated road look at this huge hole over here they cut in i did the measurements from the bottom of this hole to the high spot over here there's a 13 inch difference in height and they're saying that's a graded road so i'm going to go over there just past where grumpy is right now there's a big hump and i'm going to start cutting it with my blade because my blade will cut better than his box and i'm going to start bringing it back this way and kind of fill this low spot here and we're going to do the same thing with some of the highs and low spots down here and up over the hill and around the corner and all that i'll start cutting out the high spots and loosening them up inside the blade and then bringing them to the low spots where grumpy will use his box scraper to drag it all smooth my [Music] what i'm trying to do is cut down that hump and then dump it in the low spot i'm actually trying to drag most material through the low spot to this far side of it that way i can come over here put my blade down and backplate it back through there to make it a smooth pass through it ideally see where the blade skipped that spot right there that means it's still low so we're gonna harvest a little more material from right here because that's still a little high and bring that up without making another low spot where we harvest the material from the tricky part all right we're getting somewhere do [Music] okay so i got the high and low spots down by uh my neighbor's driveway knocked out pretty good when they did this they made such a high spot on either side of her driveway that when the water pulls up it was going to pull up right in the entryway of her driveway and make a big old water mess that she has to drive through every time so i lowered everything on either side of her driveway and made where the entrance to her driveway goes in a higher spot so that it won't pull with water which was completely stupid of them to do but they don't know what they're doing so they do stupid stuff so i did that grumpy is working on making sure his driveway is not a low spot it's his is decent but he's helping out so he's cutting a bunch of material out of the middle and moving it into these big stupid holes they made my driveway's got a massive hole right in front of it like like a foot foot and a half deep big old stretch they made right in front of that i'll deal with that part later i want to get the rest of this fixed up first we're going to end up having a lake in front of our driveways what's going to happen but there's not enough material here to completely fill that hole unless we completely wipe out everything they brought in which i'm debating doing so we're coming up here now higher um this is you see the tractors in the deep here this right here is going to fill with water which we're on top of a hill here why is there any need to make a spot that fills with water uh so i'm gonna start up there cut down some of these high points in the middle it's kind of hard to see it right next to the tractor it dips down goes back up kind of fill that in blend all this together and off the hill here and kind of slope it to the side so the water gets down over there and heads off towards that big field instead of staying in the road when you're building roads or maintaining them or even designing it from scratch the number one consideration is always water flow water flow dictates everything in this case they never thought a bit about water so we're trying to change that a little bit and make the water pull up where we want and run off where we want the problem with this road is it's a bowl in here it's downhill all the way into it there's nowhere for water to run away because everything goes uphill so the water runs down here and then sits and saturates there's a big open field right here why make the road the ditch that fills with water when we can kind of direct it off that way and saturating the ground over here which it does pretty well because this is all sand we're in the desert so it does dissipate in the ground good why make the road the spot where the water saturates it's like i said they don't know what they're doing and they screwed up what was a very good road so i'm gonna get this here tuned up and kind of fixed up some and grumpy's moving some bulk material there to like kind of re-completely reshape everything and then i'll go down and help him get everything smoothed up so back to it we go [Music] okay here's another thing that shows inexperience uh there's a lot of roads everywhere where dirt road comes on the paved road and there's an approach like this you notice at some of those intersections the pavement stays nice and clean other ones there's rocks drug out all through the road always and always needs to be swept off if you're wondering why that is it's because of this step right here now when they came out and dumped all this material in here and graded the road they made this big crown right here and it was super high and then tapered down to be dead level with the top of the pavement so it's a smooth transition but this isn't final grade this is subgrade this is what you put down shape and compact before you put rock on it shaping compacting are the two things they didn't do they got the putting it on the ground part right but subgrade needs to be lower than final grade so that when you put the rock in the rock will be at this level straight across so i got down about four inches right here at the entryway which is pretty good and then the rock will fin off to three two inches whatever as it goes along depending on how solid the road is because if you have a downhill slope onto your pavement intersection and the subgrade is dead even with your pavement now when you add that thicker rock to it and go up the rock is just going to constantly get drug out onto the road and it's a problem you'll constantly fight so i came up here and cut a step at the end of the pavement so when we fill with the rock the rock will be the level of the pavement and then taper away without thinning out on the road until it gets way off up there that thicker rock at the beginning once we compact it down will give a good solid base that won't chunk out and start the uh washboards as it goes from cars making the transition from pavement to rock then the rock can thin out a little bit as it goes just for mud and dust control but at the beginning you need a good solid and hard layer of rock butts up to the pavement so that you have an easy transition that doesn't start the washboards that would then continue down the whole road now digging all this out right here and creating that step and reshaping the road away from the pavement instead of sloping down into it also gave me a ton of material to bring down there and fill in that big huge hole they had so i kind of solved two problems at once here grumpy's doing the same thing down there right now he's taking where they just made a massive hump of material cutting down that big high spot putting in some low spots so hopefully kind of disperses the water out towards that big empty field over there instead of pulling it in the road now i'm not saying i'm the most knowledgeable road builder out there and the best equipment operator there ever was not even close but come on water flow and the difference between subgrade and final grade are two of the most basics of dirt work all right she fires up a little better when it's a little warmer outside so i'm done with all my heavy cutting and filling in this area and grumpy looks like he's about done with all his down there so i'm going to spin my blade around backwards so that i can back drag to smooth all this stuff out using the back side of the blade and then i can be looking forward instead of doing this with my neck the whole time being sore so and i know the wannabe super operators out there are gonna go off with their stuff about if you were a real operator you'd finish grade going forward well guess what dummy i am going forward okay so what i'm doing right now and i don't know how well you can see this probably pretty decent is i'm cutting the high spots with my bucket and then filling the low spots with the material i pulled out but as you can see this road now is pretty level all the way down here other than this giant hole right here which is just going to turn into a lake right in front of my driveway once it rains but without hauling in a couple loads of material to fill that which we don't have not too much i can do so where i gotta pull in and out's kind of elevate a little i'll put some more material and then i'll take it out of my driveway and bring down so that we won't have to drive through the lake to get into our driveway but this is not ideal so where grumpy's that needed major major work so he's literally scooping up material and moving it and dumping a new spot and then we'll drag it down and then whatever little highs and lows we have we'll repeat that same process we just did right here and it will look like this all the way out of here all right well grumpy and i've been working on this all morning but now it's lunch time so i've got the tractors parked and i'm gonna go get something deep but let me show you where we're at here all right so the big huge hole in front of my driveway it's going to turn into a lake i didn't get to but got everybody else's tuned up pretty good and look at this nice i mean shadows make it you can't see anything so i don't know why i did that but nice smooth road all the way down all the way out to the pavement so big improvement what are you looking at oh i thought it was a scratch exactly clear stuff they put on oh they're scratches too if you look there's plenty of them you don't have scratches and a couple dents i even got a couple dents with scratches in them that's the good stuff look at that you can go 50 miles an hour now yeah maybe we should put the bumps back good idea or maybe we ought to make an obstacle course with some great big rocks so they got to go and weave between as someone who owns nothing but four wheel drive vehicles and jeeps i'm more than okay with that whole baby good you like pepper spicy yeah so yeah you woke up real quick so we came down here to lunch at the only restaurant in town it's called the feeding trough and it's a that trailer right there and it's parked outside the only store in town which is that house right there so not a lot of options here but luckily it's good stuff so totally worth it it's almost close enough we could drive the tractors here yeah i mean we wouldn't make it by lunch but we could we'd make it you'd have to get up five o'clock in the morning we'd make it so we're gonna have lunch and uh discuss taking over the road department so we're pretty sure the main person on the road department quit anyway um i think we can take over ain't good plan to be we'll take over we'll blow the entire budget on paving our road up to our houses and then we'll resign that work sure it's going to work great so wednesday yeah let's get some lunch all right so we got our lunch it was really good it was excellent yeah a little trailer right there if you ever need food and you're in alfalfa i tell you to choose that place but you don't get a choice that's the only place so good thing it's good some guy come over here and welded rear end jeep and tore up my gravel went off-road without permission i don't know who would have done that i probably riley it was it was definitely riley's instructions not my choice i did what riley said cool but luckily i know a guy with a tractor who can go smooth it all out yeah well you know what i just left it so oh i got gravel in my bucket so we're back from lunch uh and dropped grumpy off and we decided that we need to take over the road department not that that's what any of us like want to want to do but i think we need to take over the road department my wife's suggestion so my suggestion too managing it yes manage the road department so we're gonna we're smart enough to use the equipment we don't have to have somebody else do it not smart enough to use the equipment is the correct word but we can use the equipment so um we're gonna see how that goes the next road department meeting uh everyone on the road apart right now wants to quit and like the one lady kind of already did so it might not be too hard to take over the road department so you are looking at the new road department i guess the new interim road department until we take over and make it official so we got our road all smoothed out and done apparently at some point they're bringing in the gravel and we'll probably have to blade the gravel smooth too and then i'd i don't know about that we'll see yeah what how good of a job they do and then uh i'd like to rent a roller once we get it inflated down and then roll it we probably should contact them and see what they have or york lies for gravel yeah they ordered one dump truck load of gravel for a half mile of road obviously that's not gonna work worthless so that's why we need to be the new road department so we know that stuff right so i think that's the plan should we go get a roller well we gotta wait for gravel then we can go get a roller we'd roll out before we put gravel i know that'd be ideal but then we need to roll it twice so we need to know when the gravel's showing up so we can roll that right before put the gravel down blade it roll the gravel and then we have a good road yep um forward uh so that's our plan and that's it for this video um we had to film all this that way we could make enough money off this youtube video to put fuel back in the tractors and hopefully pay for lunch too so yeah so oh grumpy bought lunch so yeah you guys owe grumpy enough views to pay for lunch all right that is it for this one we're all gonna go home and i'll see you guys next time

Channel: Casey LaDelle

Views: 306,667

Keywords: tow truck, towing, wrecker, recovery, rescue, off road, stuck, jeep, kinetic rope, heavy rescue, winch, 4x4, 4wheeling, overland, overlanding, tractor, HOA, homeowners association, road maintenance, grading, gravel

Id: XAQPAZj3Ihk

Length: 24min 37sec (1477 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 06 2021