As the time passes, the pavement in front of your house or office starts to lose the beauty and small cracks start to appear on it. Even the smooth and glazy look of the pavement is faded. This the time you should decide whether to sealcoat your pavement or do a full maintenance of it. You will find the maintenance guys of asphalt companies are knocking at your door, looking for business. But before you hire an asphalt company you must have a good idea about the asphalt and your pavement.
What is asphalt?
An experienced asphalt company knows that technically this is tar, a combination of bituminous and stones and aggregate. For building a pavement a good asphalt company in Michigan will not only consider the quality of asphalt required, but also the soil, climate, weather change, rainfall, even the season and usage of the pavement. These all are the key factors of designing a good pavement. To make a pavement the paving contractors in Michigan have to level the soil and make a smooth base. Then they have to build a solid stone base to hold the pavement. This base must also have good water drainage also the quality of this base is determined by the traffic, this pavement is going to face. After this the contractors put the asphalt and level it.
Sealcoating and repairing
An experienced asphalt company will always recommend you not to seal coat your pavement immediately after making it not even a year later. Many residential asphalt companies in Michigan will insist you to do this but never go with their ideas. You need to wait at least 2-3 years to seal coat a regular pavement and 2-5 years for pavement with heavy traffic. Now before you choose to seal coat your pavement it is necessary to take a close look of your pavement for cracks. Paving contractors in Michigan may try to convince you that the sealer will also coat the cracks but in reality they don’t. As a result water will flow through the asphalt layer and get stored somewhere on between asphalt and stone layer. At winter times the water will freeze and make the cracks larger. With time these will become potholes. To prevent this, a good asphalt company will use a rubber crack sealer before anything. After this they will use a good seal coating to make it as good as new.
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