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Hi, I'm Tim Carter from AskTheBuilder.com, and we're going to have a little fun here right now
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I want you to look at this pavement. It's actually a roadway in the town where I live in New Hampshire
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And tell me what you think. Let's look down at it right now. This is a road surface. You can see out, there's the main road out that way
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and I've got my keys right here for scale and you can see you know I can rub this and
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this doesn't this is very durable and guess what it's already been plowed twice this season but now
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I want you to look at this right next to it this looks about the same wouldn't you say
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Look at that. You can see the stones. You can see. Very durable. Look back here. Get a little closer
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Okay. What do you think? Can you tell the difference between the two? You know what it is
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I'll explain it. It's really, really simple. The first pavement surface where you saw my keys
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that's called seal and chip or tar and chip and all it is are small pieces of
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stone that are placed in an asphalt emulsion that very sticky and sticks to the existing road surface The second pavement that I showed you when we went to the left that regular blacktop Well
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guess what? It uses the same stones. It uses the same asphalt, basically, the same sticky asphalt
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That's the cement that holds everything together. But the only other thing it uses
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is a little bit of fine sand or coarse sand that they mix in with it. But after a few years
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that wears off and basically both pavement surfaces look the same. So that's why when you
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look at brand new blacktop, it's very black, it's smoother, and that's because that you're seeing
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the sand at the surface. It hasn't worn off yet. And the blackness comes from the asphalt cement
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that is coating all of those stones. But you can see what happens. After a while, that wears off
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So now you've learned that the seal and chip surface, it's just as good basically as blacktop
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It's done on thousands of miles of roadways across the United States every year
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And it's going to work really, really well in our town. And it's going to save us a lot of money
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I'm Tim Carter for AskTheBuilder.com. If you want to discover more home improvement tips
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go to AskTheBuilder.com
