Quote:
Originally Posted by bigbadhillwilliam
Moffitt is almost 20 year old disc golf distances. Concrete makes redesign more difficult if not impossible.
Moffitt could use a redesign. Will the city allow a redesign? I see lots of additional space out at the course. Rubber pads allow for an easier redesign and also allows water to drain better.
Concrete for moffitt is like souping up a moped.
I understand HFDS and HPARD have agreed on concrete. Was rubber ever considered, and if not why not?
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ROTFLMAO! Nope William, you are the first one to ever come up with that idea.
Here is a little history of what has been tried at Moffitt to date:
- Mid-Late 90's - rutted tee boxes were filled with caliche rock and tamped. Also, I believe that pee-gravel was used on a few boxes as a test. They eroded, gravel/rocks either sank into the mud or were kicked out.
- Late 98 or so: sand was used. That eroded very quickly and was scattered out of the boxes.
- Early 2000 - a couple of bags of concrete was mixed in with caliche rock on #9 and watered a little. Caliche wasn't bound by cement properly and rutted out.
- 2001 - Steve Dufrane brought out two rubber pads to loan us for trial solution. Installed one on #9 and one on #11. The pad on #9 curled up on edges and developed deep indentation in the middle. Steve enventually took them back.
- 2001-2002 - HFDS installed wooden frames to help contain dirt and filled boxes with decomposed granite, tamped all down. Once the clay sank into the ground, the granite that wasn't decomposed turned into little ball-bearings.
Course redesign of Moffitt is something that can be discussed separately at a club meeting, but it should be treated completely separately from the installation of concrete tee boxes.
While I agree with folks that rubber mats do make things more flexible, in theory, the fact is that rubber pads only work if the base is properly prepared with the right materials...which doesn't make them portable at all.
The reason why concrete should be chosen (at least for Moffitt) is because of the type of soil out there. When it rains, it retains water and gets really soft. When you put rock or gravel on top of that soil, they get pushed into the ground and sink. When they dry up again, the clay blows away exposing the gravel again. The only thing that is likely to be maintenance-free is concrete. This is because the weight of the concrete will be spread/distributed over a large surface area preventing it from sinking into the soft soil.
Cost-wise, concrete works out to be less cost than the tee pads. The $150 price cited previously only covers the cost of the rubber pad. It doesn't include the cost of the materials necessary for prepping the ground underneath the rubber pads. Look at the amount of material and labor went into the tee pads that Steve Dufrane constructed at Shaw Shank. The proposed concrete pads at Moffitt as constructed by HPARD will cost us around $150-165 per tee including materials and labor. Sure seems like a better solution all the way around - except for the accommodation of a course re-design. I doubt that the course will be redesigned...there is some historical significance to it even though many of the trees once used for object golf before the baskets were installed have died now.
It seems like we might be able to acheive significant enhancements to the existing course if we could campaign with HPARD to allow us to plant trees
in strategic locations. (Sculpt our own fairways and obstacles that way.)
Larry