Carvin' up the road

I lost a wheel on a motor home in about 1987 because of the frost heaves at the joints crossing Minnesota. Maybe this gets rid of those edges that stuck up.

I do know what you are talking about. Here they only do 3 cutouts about where the prime wheel travel occurs, one set toward the right, one set toward the left. I do NOT know what they are doing exactly as the lanes are available the next day (work done at night).

I assume they are epoxying some type of transfer dowel in the cuts. Once they have done all pavement joints in this manner, they send a diamond plane down the highway to eliminate highs and lows. Man are they ever smooth when complete.

They have to tie the slabs together at the expansion joints before they do the profile grinding, or the slabs will just start to tilt again and the "Slab Slap" will come right back.

When they are reworking the concrete freeways around here and totally replacing large sections of broken-up concrete, the rebar comes pre-fab in 12' x 20' panel sections that make up one slab.

And they have stacks of a separate gadget that looks like a xylophone with hollow tubes that is an expansion joint dowel system of some sort. They place one set of expansion tubes on each side of the joint with free-floating dowels in between, and they keep the adjacent slabs flat and in-line with each other, even when they are allowed to expand and contract towards each other.

Probably used both end-to-end and side-to-side (in lesser quantities because the main stresses are fore and aft), since you don't want the slabs tilting, either. Trucks falling over sideways while going down the highway is not a pretty sight. ;-)

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