Down a truly rough road in my class C?

pnichols wrote:

DrewE wrote:

pnichols wrote:

BTW, I have a theory regarding how a washboard road surface comes about: Maaaaaaybe from folks down through the years before the washboard existed driving too fast on the road surface. Perhaps related to the torque on drive axles being applied via a series of pulses from an internal combustion engine's up and down piston motion? I'll bet that roads didn't get "washboarded" in the good old horse-and-buggy days.

The engine vibration has nothing to do with washboarding; it's at a wildly different frequency (at least a few octaves higher). According to the very quick "research" I've done, the main contributors seem to be the speed of traffic--below maybe 5 mph or so it doesn't occur at all--the amount of traffic, and the susceptibility of the road material to be moved about by wheels going over it, which in turn depends on its makeup and the general climatic conditions: whether it's muddy, dusty, etc.

It was likely a far less prevalent problem in horse-and-buggy days due to the slower speed of travel. That does not mean the roads were not rough, of course; horse shoes and skinny iron-bound wheels can tear up dirt pretty well under the right (wrong?) conditions.

I wasn't referring to engine vibration.

The (heavy) engine flywheel notwithstanding, what I had in mind was the diameter of the drive tires - versus vehicle speed - versus crankshaft RPM - versus piston up/down motion causing their power pushes to make the crankshaft torque come in a bunch of "rapid spurts" ... all this interacting together to cause the drive tires to kindof "hop" down the road and hence eventually carve out a series of lateral ripples in a flat and soft road surface that originally was smooth. As time goes on, the lateral ripples only get worse as drive tires continue to hop more violently and dig out the ripples deeper and deeper.

I've scene how vehicles rip down those desert roads trying to "smooth out" the washboarding -> washboarding that maybe was itself originally started by vehicles ripping too fast down those roads when they were smooth, long ago. There's always an excuse to drive fast everywhere and always an eventual price to be paid, IMHO. :S