RasterWeb: Rambles: tarnacles

What's a tarnacle? Well, it's like this... We have a garage, but in the summer we tend to park both cars on the street (as opposed to one, which is parked there year-round) and this street, it's not the best street. No. It's tar alley. The City® sends these crews to our street to make sure it has a healthy coating of tar. I'm no road scholar, so I'm not exactly sure what purpose the tar serves, except to provide material for tarnacles...

So what happens when the temperature gets up around 80 or 90 degrees, as it has much of this summer? Well, the tar gets soft. The tar gets sticky. Tarnacles are born! See, you park your car on an unsuspecting patch of road, and all seems fine. Until the next day when you drive away, and hear 'ku-klunk, ku-klunk, ku-klunk...' the unmistakable sound of a tarnacle. So you pull over and attempt to remove the tarnacle. The first one we had was the worst, because we didn't know what it was. We did notice the car sort of wobbling on the freeway a bit, and upon further inspection found the tarnacle. We managed to get it off (it was really attached!) with some gasoline and steel wire brush.

Most tarnacles after that weren't as bad. If you can get them off right away they don't have a good chance to attach securely. You do risk tarring up your hands pretty good, depending on the viscosity of the tar. Tarnacles are sometimes mistakenly called tarbuckles, but only by me.

tarnacles suck!

  Last Modified: 04.02.2001 by rasterboy