I was on a crew some time back and we had a jillion miles of sub-grade that needed blue topped. The job had half of the road excavated while the traffic was pushed over on the other half.
Access to the grade was limited and it wound up easier to stop the truck in traffic and throw fresh wood out to the crew. In a haste, someone (:-$) accidently knocked a little 2" square cardboard box out of the back of the carry-all...that was full of hub tacks. They scattered in the breeze. I tried to kick most of them off the asphalt, but it was futile.
About a half mile down the way there was a lone gas station. We took a break there that afternoon. We were sitting on the curb, by the soda pop machine, right outside the garage while we sucked out Coca-Colas and cooled off. We could hear the attendant right around the corner, talking to a customer as he was fixing his flat tire.
"I don't know where all these came from. This is third or fourth tire I fixed today with these in them....they look like some sort of upholstery tack..."
None of us said a thing. A couple of grins to each other as we finished the pop and headed back to our chores. I'm glad nobody really knew where those little "upholstery tacks" came from..:snarky:
Thank you for sharing that story
I finally know the source of my problem back in 1969.
One of the things that would irk the he!! out of me when I was crew chief on the slope was to get a flat tire with one of our own PK nails or the 8d nails we used for centerline staking. Crew thought it was cool, as we didn't carry a spare and had to use a service truck to come change the tire. Considering we were the surveyors, we were always out on some back road to a drill pad or something and it could take hours to find us to change the dam tire! (we weren't allowed to carry a spare to do it ourselves, some kind of union thing) Sometimes thought they did it on purpose, but never could prove it and the HR department didn't want me to hurt anybodies feelings!
-JD-
> One of the things that would irk ..me ... was to get a flat tire with one of our own PK nails...
On a local job some years back our crew used PK nails with brass washer, with company name stamped, for control points along a road job. One day a fellow sent an email to the department manager with a picture of his tire, flat, with a PK nail-complete with washer- sticking in it. Being unable to deny that it was ours we bought him a new tire.
Kinda on topic.... we used to do cross sections of all the roads in Prudhoe on a yearly basis (took about a friggin year to get all of them!) 100' C/L stations on straight stretchs and 50' on curves. We would lay out maybe a 1000' or so with 8d nails with yellow flagging. One day we were taking a coffee break as the VECO electro-magnet came by (had a generator and a big electric magnet towed by a truck). Intent was to remove nails and other metallic crap on the road. Glanced over as he went by, "Holy Crap!", there were probably 200 nails with yellow flagging stuck to the bottom! Fortunately, there wasn't any traffic that day, so we could walk the C/L and find the little holes and put new nails in.
-JD-
My Dad was a crew chief for a construction company years ago. They were taking off at noon on a Friday for a long weekend. The rodman didn't want to walk all the way back for a backsight since it was nearly time to leave. So he set a PK nail, point up, on the backsight so it could be seen from the next setup. The owner of the company drove across the job and over the PK flattening his tire. Didn't take him long to figure out which department was responsible. Guess who didn't get his long weekend...
