Slag agregate

[bobodu]

Anyone familiar with the stuff? I can get it for $3.90 a ton two miles down the road and wonder how well it would work for my little drive to the barn.

 

[Renze]

They used to do a farm road to our field with it... you mean the same yellow powdery stuff as i, dont you ?

A guy that lived 50 meter from that road complained a lot about dust.. the slag dust made it allmost impossible to drink tea outside, because the silage trailers threw up so much dust.
The road now has been paved with asphalt.

The slag does serve well as a base, but i'd use a toplayer to cover it..

 

[ToadHill]

If you mean old steel slag, it was common around here until they closed the Bethleham steel plant. It was used for a lot of roads.

 

[EddieWalker]

We have two types of slag that I'm aware of in our area. One is a black glass type slag from Tyler Pipe. It's very attractive looking when on the ground, but it never locks together, so it's always moving and shifting around. Kind of like walking on sand. It also sticks to your shoes, so if you walk on it, you will carry some of it into the house with you. Over time, it breaks down and disapears. When it's there, it is a dry place to walk and drive on, but I don't know how much of a load it can handle. People use it for driveways and parking areas with fair results.

There is another type of slag that comes from down towards Austin that looks like limestone. It's grey in color and rough around the edges. You buy it by the size and they truck it up here. First you buy a load of the big stuff, which is several inches in size. Spread that and then have the fine stuff delivered. They don't mix the sizes on the trucks that deliver it. Spread the fines over the big stuff so that it locks together. When done, it's a very nice looking driveway that is solid. It's rather labor intensive since you have to do it twice. It's fairly new to the area, so I don't know how long it will last or hold up. The guy selling it says its as strong as limestone, but from looking at it, I don't believe him. A load of it costs just as much as limestone, which is a proven road building material.

That price is very cheap, which makes it very tempting. Of couse, if it doesn't do anything, you just wasted your time and money. Before buying it, I would ask to see where it's been used and then go take a look. Even better, check it out on a rainy day when it really matters.

Even more important then what you use is that you have sufficient drainage. If you don't have a place for the water to go, and for it to move away from your road quickly, nothing that you put down will last, or even perform very well.

Good luck,
Eddie

 

[LBrown59]

There is another type of slag that comes from down towards Austin that looks like limestone. It's grey in color and rough around the edges. You buy it by the size and they truck it up here. First you buy a load of the big stuff, which is several inches in size. Spread that and then have the fine stuff delivered. They don't mix the sizes on the trucks that deliver it. Spread the fines over the big stuff so that it locks together. When done, it's a very nice looking driveway that is solid. It's rather labor intensive since you have to do it twice.
Good luck,
Eddie

The slag i get here is From a local steel mill and veries from a green to a blckish gray.
It's far superior to any stone or gravel for a drive way or parking lot.
I bought 6 ton of it recently for under $4 a ton.
Gravel was $12 a ton and it would probably have taken about 10 ton of gravel to cover the same area I covered with the 6 ton of slag.
Since it is a lot lighter than stone rock gravel etc you get a bunch more of it per ton and a much larger coverage area per ton.
Cost less goes further can't beat that.

 

[LBrown59]

Anyone familiar with the stuff? I can get it for $3.90 a ton two miles down the road and wonder how well it would work for my little drive to the barn.

Slag is the prefered stuff here see why in my above reply.

 

[LBrown59]

They used to do a farm road to our field with it... you mean the same yellow powdery stuff as i, dont you ?

A guy that lived 50 meter from that road complained a lot about dust.. the slag dust made it allmost impossible to drink tea outside, because the silage trailers threw up so much dust.
The road now has been paved with asphalt.

The slag does serve well as a base, but i'd use a toplayer to cover it..

Nothing at all like the slag I get here from out local steel mill.
Unlike lime stone our slag isn't dusty dirty or tracky.

 

[LBrown59]

If you mean old steel slag, it was common around here until they closed the Bethleham steel plant. It was used for a lot of roads.

Good stuff and still available from a local mill here.

 

[Oldmax]

Most of the slag we get in this area is light and full of holes and tends to float out in heavy rains. Unless you are getting the scale that comes from mill I would stay away from slag.

 

[andymil]

In western PA, slag was the agregrate used in asphalt when it was available. One construction company had an asphalt plant right on J & L Steel property in the early eighties. I'm not sure if they still use slag it or not.

We can still get slag from steel mills. The cost is about the same as limestone delivered. For the first driveway I used #3 (slightly smaller than a tennis ball) without fines for a base (about 6 ") and #2 modified with fines for the top. This fills the gaps but gets splashed up on the cars and tracked into the garage. I ended up putting linestone on top of it.

For the second driveway, I used the #3's for the base and topped it with milled asphalt ground from a construction company resurfacing a local road. Some companies even screen the milled asphalt. The asphalt locks the base in and binds itself thgether when it warms up and is driven on. I'm told that spraying diesel fuel on it really binds it together but I wouldn't want the DEP to find me doing that. Fuel is too expensive any way. Sometimes the asphalt is hard to get because it is reused.

I'm not sure about the slag you're getting, but the stuff we get is heavy and hard. I don't think you can beat that price.