XJsavage
CounterCulture
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2009
- Location
- Lyle's Ford SC
That statement goes back to the days when I worked for a pavement marking company. A superintendent over the handline crew named Derek used to use that one all the time on the trainees. Basically it was simple heads up warning; meaning that some of the worst drivers on the road typically drive a 4 door car of no significant brand. It only took a few minutes working out on the road to figure out he was spot-on, correct, validated, word to ya motha, point taken.Ouch.
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In pavement marking, you have four different crews. Temporary paint (goes down within an hour of fresh asphalt having been laid), Marker (reflective markers adhered with hot tar), Long line (4",5" or 6" wide yellow or white doubles, skips, mini skips, suicides, etc) and then there's Handline, (RR crossings, arrows, Chevron's, stop bars, X-walks, SCHOOL, etc). Handline is the crew I worked on. It was by far the roughest because it involved setting up temporary lane closures and pacing out cones for every stop. Everything we did involved the permanent application of Thermoplastic. Molten temp is above 340 degrees and it's ideal working temp is around 375. The material is as imagined, melted plastic that starts as a powder and is applied in liquid state and then cools into a hard durable crust that has bonds with the road surface immediately.
Whenever we'd set out to lay down an arrow, stopbar, or whatever, we would obviously have to set up a lane closure for us to work in and to keep cars from driving right through it. If a car tire did roll through it at the right time, the molten plastic would fling up and bond itself to the painted sheet metal and almost always destroy the paint job, not to mention leave tire tracks that we had to go back and fix. No matter how non-obstructive our closure was, some asshat in a car would drive right through our cones and ruin our fresh thermo. Even if there was less than an inch of room clearance between the cones, us, or our trucks that they could squeeze into, they would. And it was 99% of the time a compact or midsize car. Damn near always.