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Show 'Road Building With Rubber Tested in Utah Building roads with rubber is the current problem being undertaken under-taken by the Utah State Road Commission engineers. In recent months the materials designers and laboratory technicians of the Commission's testing laboratory have been busy on research and experiments with various types of rubber and asphalt combinations to determine the best formula to be used with available local aggregates! ag-gregates! Hundreds of samples have been run and tested under the most rigid control to simulate actual act-ual specifications and construction. construc-tion. The engineers now feel that road test itself is the only way to tell how such rubber asphalt paving as they have designed will perform over the long haul and under the pounding of heavy traffic traf-fic and changing weather. The Commission has authorized the laying of such a comparative test strip on U. S. Highway 40 on 4th and 5th South Streets between be-tween 7th and 11th East in Salt Lake City with alternate sections of rubber asphalt and regular asphalt. as-phalt. Actual surfacing work on the test project to be aided by Gibbons and Reed Construction Company of Salt Lake City, will await the arrival of the rubber from the factory. The rubber material ma-terial to be used is a latex emulsion, emul-sion, light grey in color; its characteristics char-acteristics are that it is fluid at normal working temperatures of 65 to 90 degrees F. ; requires no heating to handle; contains 50 water and 50 y2 rubber latex by weight; will freeze at around 32 degrees F., has a specific gravity of 0.96 weighing 8" lbs. per gallon. It is estimated that the rubber sections will require a total of 960 tons of bituminous mix containing con-taining 52.8 tons or a general average av-erage of 5.5 rubber asphalt of which 10 will be latex emulsion containing a total of about 2.64 tons of actual residual rubber. All in all the job wil lrequire nearly 1320 gallons of the latex emulsion to be fed into the batch plant at ' the rate of 23 gallons every minute. |