base for gravel

[check]

You can but it won't last. An inch of topsoil can turn a foot of clean gravel into mud. If you dig out all the organic top soil and replace with good gravel or crushed rock it will last for decades.

Yes, I kind of figured that, but I am procrastinating because I have to dig it out with my 4' wide, BX25 FEL, and each bucket has to go 200' or so to dump it. Also, there are a lot of rocks, so I have to go thru with the BH first and get rid of them. Work, work, work....

 

[vtsnowedin]

Yes, I kind of figured that, but I am procrastinating because I have to dig it out with my 4' wide, BX25 FEL, and each bucket has to go 200' or so to dump it. Also, there are a lot of rocks, so I have to go thru with the BH first and get rid of them. Work, work, work....

That's what you bought the tractor for isn't it?

 

[dmccarty]

Measuring moisture in aggregate is no trick. take a sample of about a pound and weight it on a scale that reads to a single gram. Your wife's diet scale will do. put it in a cake tin and into an oven at 350 until it is totally dry. let it cool then weight it again. The wet weight minus the dry weight gives the moisture content in grams then divide by the wet weight to get the moisture in the sample as a percentage. If you had 1000 grams wet and 900 dry you would have had 100 grams of water and a 10% sample.
...
If what you produce locally called crusher run holds more then that it has too much dust and clay in it to pass most specifications. Some soft rock sources turn into a very dusty product when crushed that may pack well in the south but would not stand freeze thaw cycles hear in New England.

Soooooo, let me see if I got this right:

• Take some rock from a dump truck and put in the wife's cake pan....
• Use my wife's scale to weigh said rock...
• Bake rock, in wife's cake pan, in the wife's oven...

While this technique certainly will work, I am not sure how well the technique will work out for me! :shocked::confused3:

The ABC road base in NC is all hard rock, pretty sure granite rock and fines, from the three quarries I have gotten rock. In South FLA the road base was all limestone aka shell rock, that was dredged from lakes. The quarries flooded due to the shallow water table so you have deep lakes and not deep rock pits. :laughing: A few years ago, one of the kid's had a field trip to the local quarry. One of the quarries I used to go to allowed you to get sorta close to the pit but at this quarry I had not seen the hole. Well, we drove down into the pit. The quarry opened up maybe a decade ago but that pit is almost to China! Unreal how far down it goes. I was talking to one of the employees and it turns out he used to live in the South FLA when I did. He used to work in the shell rock lakes down there before moving up here to work in the quarry.

Later,
Dan

 

[vtsnowedin]

Soooooo, let me see if I got this right:

• Take some rock from a dump truck and put in the wife's cake pan....
• Use my wife's scale to weigh said rock...
• Bake rock, in wife's cake pan, in the wife's oven...

While this technique certainly will work, I am not sure how well the technique will work out for me! :shocked::confused3:

Well if you don't do the dishes and clean up after your on your own.
I used to do these tests in field lab trailers using a hot plate for the heat. Cheap bread loaf pans worked well and a couple would last the life of the project. You could also warm up your lunch on the hot plate using a different pan.
If your quarry has a hard rock in it they still need to run the product over a dust screen to make spec material for concrete or pavement aggregate. This gives them quite a pile of dust to dispose of. They sell as much of it as they can mixed with some 3/4 minus stone for driveway dressing. they usually come up with some trade name such as "Hardpak" for it. It is alright for unpaved drives but a spec mixture of 1 1/2" minus stone and clean sand is much better if your going to pave over it.

 

[ruffdog]

The neighbor excavator would have the job half done by the time I would talk the wife into using her pans to cook some gravel.

 

[vtsnowedin]

The neighbor excavator would have the job half done by the time I would talk the wife into using her pans to cook some gravel.

Well not everyman can have a beautiful, sweet, charming and obedient wife. Unless you can convince her it will make "Her driveway" to "HER house" look better and last longer and save "Her money" you might be better off to buy a pan down at the dollar store and dry out your sample on "your grill".

 

[63spyder]

Here I use what's called 3/4 minus as a top coat, it's aways wet as this keeps the fines from settling out and the drivers never have a problem spreading. On top of that my driveway is so steep and 1/2 mile long that they like to spread it going down hill.