Good outcome: Road paving job vs wife's car

Sunday morning, my wife was returning home after working a night shift (in downtown Detroit, at Henry Ford Hospital--it can be as bad as it sounds). The route home has two alternates--unless you go a few miles further--and both are being paved at the same time. She evidently picked the wrong route, and had no choice but to drive in the tack coat (that tar-like substance applied between pavement layers).

Her car is black, so it wasn't horribly apparent, but she had this crap everywhere. It looked like a Bonneville Salt Flat racer, except with black tar on a black car. As soon as I noticed, I took the car back to the site and asked for a supervisor. He was friendly, but admitted no fault (like I expected), and gave me the phone number of the jobsite manager.

Monday morning, I left a message with the jobsite manager, fully expecting to never receive a return call. I photographed the car the best I could, and took it to two detailing shops for quotes. I decided on one particular shop ($109), and had the job done, expecting to eat the entire bill.

While waiting for the job to finish, I got a call from the jobsite manager. He didn't argue or even place blame on my wife. He just told me to fax him the bill and he'd get us a check! He also offered, if the timing was right, to bring cash to the jobsite (around the corner from our house).

For not being a "retail" company, I really didn't expect this kind of service. I was pleasantly surprised by the good service given by Cadillac Paving Company.

Has anyone here had a bad experience with paving vs. paint?

Good to hear, although it does not sound normal for them to let you drive through a freshly tacked surface. Around here, they either close off the lane currently being paved or detour traffic entirely [close the road], so it actually sounds like somebody at the the paving company screwed up the SOP.

There is a product that the details shop has that is used for removing wax. It is also the best product to use for removing tar. We call it PrepSolv, basically a solvent product.

PrepSolv the tar off, strip wax, polish, wax.

Yeah, the flaggers should not have let you drive through the fresh tack. It was their very obviously mistake, the cost to fix it was minimal compared to the sort of things that go wrong in paving jobs, problem solved.

My wife's an estimator and project manager for one of the local highway paving companies. Some of the stories she brings home...

well, look at it this way... at least the underside has been re-undercoated

There was no way to avoid driving thru the tack--rollers were in the other lane (on the fresh pavement).

My father supervises paving crews on occasion, and one time they were using rubberized tack, which is even more tacky than the traditional asphalt type. One car drove thru into the paving site, and past crew who were trying to flag him down. A long, gooey string of tack wafted over into the other lane, where it deposited directly on the white Corvette the old fart was driving. He was obviously paying more attention to something other than the crew/jobsite/world-around-him, and he drove off, never to be seen or heard from again.

And WD-40 works great on removing this crap, along with a plastic razor blade and lots of elbow grease (followed by a buff and wax). But since I had other things to do, I farmed the job out.

Keith wrote: My wife's an estimator and project manager for one of the local highway paving companies. Some of the stories she brings home...

Do tell!

bamalama wrote:

Keith wrote: My wife's an estimator and project manager for one of the local highway paving companies. Some of the stories she brings home...

Do tell!

Ya beat me to it. Sounds like Keith needs to start a new thread.

Wait until she gets back into town tomorrow so I can make sure to get the details right. Things like a roller driver accidentally driving over a car being held by a flagger.

Keith wrote: Wait until she gets back into town tomorrow so I can make sure to get the details right. Things like a roller driver accidentally driving over a car being held by a flagger.

That'll buff out.

There are a lot of stimulus dollars going into somewhat odd road projects around Metro Detroit these days. One of them is Crooks road in Troy. This one has been bugging me because it is my direct route to the office from home and back, but it is pretty buggered uip right now. Anyway, this is a five lane road (two each direction plus center turn lane) which has a ton of those big orange barrels marking it down to two driving lanes total. The only problem is, it is very much NOT clear what two lanes of this five lane expanse are meant to be open becuase they seem to switch around daily and are not clearly marked at all the hundreds of intersections. Sure enough, on my way home from work last week I saw a Toyota stuck in a pit where the road was simply missing. It was bound to happen and I could see that kind of mixup leading to an automative tar application. Just be glad she didn't get stuck in pit like the Toyota guy, it was clear he suffered some real damage.

I told Janel about that and she said sometimes they'll fool around with the traffic patterns just to keep the drivers paying attention. Of course, this can be done well. She also noted that they get fined if they delay traffic for too long. If the options are a $25,000 fine or detailing a few cars that get tack on them, well...

So, Janel got home today and I asked her for the best stories. First one out of her mouth was from when they were paving a road into some condos in Aspen. Some woman ignored the flagger, slalomed around two rollers - workers scattering, including Janel - and sat behind the paver, honking her horn to get it to move faster than 2 mph. As she sank up into 4" of uncompacted asphalt. Then she had the nerve to ask the company to pay to detail her car. She probably got hit with criminal charges instead.

Once, a chipper had some sort of electrical problem and just stopped dead in the road. While descending a mountain pass with 4 rollers running behind it. Turns out you can't stop a roller on fresh gravel, so the chipper got hit four times.

Lots of stories about tomfoolery on the job site as well. If you push a loader up against a portapotty until it juuuust starts to buckle, you know the guy inside isn't coming out in a hurry! On the flip side, if you let the bucket of your loader crash to the ground right beside the porta, whoever's inside is going to come screaming out in a hurry because it sounds like the end of the world in there.

The best was a story about a tack truck, though. They have an arm on each side that hold the nozzles. They can be raised or lowered manually depending on how wide the tack needs to be spread. If you raise one, you need to turn off the valve. So, new guy is driving the tack truck on a job in Aspen and didn't turn off the valve. He turns on the tack and proceeds to spray it horizontally out the side of the truck like a touchless car wash - right into oncoming traffic.

$109 to detail Kramer's car? She wouldn't even blink, it's not worth the time to debate it. Good publicity too - everyone here knows about Cadillac Paving in Michigan now.