The gully to pond project

[jinman]

. . . Contech Construction Products has a plant or yard here.........
Arlington Plant
2020 W Division St
Arlington, TX 76012
Phone: 817-265-2255
Fax: 817-265-2250

Brandi, I have two installed metal culverts I bought from these folks about 18 years ago (name was different, but location the same). They are great folks to do business with, but over 90 miles from me now. I was living in Grand Prairie when I bought the culverts before and hauled them up here on my own trailer. I'd have to save a bundle to make this worth my time today. I suspect many of the local sources buy culverts from them at wholesale prices. Thanks for your detailed info.

 

[EddieWalker]

How did you do the sand/clay mix? I have about 250 yd of sand I took out of a sandbar at the mouth of a creek and have been thinking of mixing that with the clay. I'd put down a layer of each and then run over that repleatedly with my 6' wide KKII tiller. I'm thinking the clay would have to be pretty dry, but that should work for mixing. What do you think?

What are you going to use the clay/sand mixture for?

I know that some people add sand to their garden soil to all more water to get through the soil and not have it compact as hard. Other then that, I'm at a loss as to why you would want to do this.

Eddie

 

[jinman]

What are you going to use the clay/sand mixture for?

I know that some people add sand to their garden soil to all more water to get through the soil and not have it compact as hard. Other then that, I'm at a loss as to why you would want to do this.

Eddie

Eddie, this red clay has two states: 1) wet and gummy, 2) dry and hard. That equates to clumps that can't be spread or a hard surface that only allows you to scrape the high spots. By mixing it with sand, I get a very workable fill that can be smoothed perfectly and then compacted. The clay will bind the sand. The clay is ideal for building the dam and compacting, but if I want a nice flat finish surface to spread topsoil over, the clay/sand mix is good. Do I have to have it? No, but it is used by lots of builders around here as fill in pad sites and also on the shoulders of roads before adding topsoil, particularly on slopes where there may be runoff. It's just a consistent material that can be easily spread and leveled out much easier than hard chunky clay. I can work the clay while it is moist, but dry is very hard. I go to backdrag and the clay moves is huge pancake like slabs that break away from the surface. One day it is mushy and the next day dry and caked.

 

[EddieWalker]

Your clay is A LOT different then my clay. I don't have chunks. It smooths great and compacts hard.

I'm always amazed at how differnet clay is in different areas. When I moved here, I hated clay because I always heard how terrible it is to work with. Even when I first started moving dirt and digging holes, I hated it. But then I realized that it's really great to work with and once spread and compacted, it's rock solid.

Eddie

 

[jinman]

I'm always amazed at how differnet clay is in different areas. When I moved here, I hated clay because I always heard how terrible it is to work with. Even when I first started moving dirt and digging holes, I hated it. But then I realized that it's really great to work with and once spread and compacted, it's rock solid.

Eddie

I'd bet your clay already has quite a bit of sand in its composition. This red clay I dig will form to the shape of the BH bucket and come out as a big cube that squishes like a ball of PlayDoh. When I dump a loader bucket full of this stuff, about half is broken up and the rest comes out in 18" to 24" squares that have to be flattened. It's all related to how pure the clay is and how much moisture is there. Since we've had lots of rain, the clay is wet down to almost 3' deep. There it drys out and becomes crumbly for another foot before turning gray/blue in color. The gray clay will have stones the size of softballs up to football size, so I try to avoid that if I''m gonna backdrag and smooth. It's the easiest clay I have to work, but the stones are a big negative. Besides, I'm not going to set aside 4' deep of materials just to get to the gray. I use the changing color as a depth gage.

Yesterday, I put down three yards of sand from my sandbar pile and covered it with three yards of clay. I tilled them together until the material was mostly mixed and carried the mix to dump it on the backside of my dam. The dam is extremely steep and the pure clay coming out in chunks and being slick makes driving up/down to compact a real carnival ride. I was able to dump the clay and then spread it with the bucket as I drove down the incline. After all the material was dumped and smooth, I circled around several times and completely compacted the material into a nice consistent surface.

I'll try to get a picture today to show the difference because I only covered about 1/4 of the dam with the 6 yards of material. As a matter of fact, I'll try to photo document the whole process so you can see what I'm talking about.

 

[jinman]

Due to my discussion with Eddie about mixing sand/clay in a 50-50 mix, I promised to show some photos of my process. First, let's look at the problem.

What I am trying to do is finish off the surface and sides of my dam with a clay mix so that the material will compact and stay where I put it. Currently, the back side of the dam is so steep that I need to stabilze it more than loose fill dirt will allow. Now, as I drive over the material, a lot of it just slides down the slope as I drive over it. If I put loads of clay on the slope, they sit there like clumps until I start to spread them. Then, they just break apart and big clods roll down the embankment. Only about 1/2 the clay stays on the slope with the rest sitting at the bottom. I'd spread from the bottom up, but there is not enough traction to do that and the wheels just dig trenches in the loose material.

Below are a few pictures of my predicament. The first is the clay. Clay holds water for a long time. (Duh! It's supposed too.) When I dig it up, it comes up in huge clumps. The first photo shows a pile of clay I dug up yesterday. This is much dryer than what I dug up a week ago, but it still clumps. There are several 24" x 24" clods in this pile. The second picture shows what happens when I place the clay and try to spread it. Big clods roll down the back side of the dam. In the photo, I was actually carefully putting clay on the top lip of the dam. If I had tried to put it on the slope, I'm sure 1/2 yard would have rolled down the hill. You can see how well the pure clay compacts in this picture also. It does fine on a flat surface as long as you can stand a few lumps where the clods don't break up.

 

[jinman]

My solution to having clay in the mix is to get sand and clay in a pile and then make repeated passes over them with my KKII tiller until they are mixed in a fairly consistent mix.

The first photo is my sand pile I collected from a sandbar out into my lake at the mouth of a creek. The 2nd photo shows a 1-1/2 yd load in my bucket being placed with three other loads (6 yd of sand). Next I hauled in 6 yards of clay and placed it on top of the sand (2 photos).

 

[jinman]

After getting all the materials into a pile, I changed tractors to my smaller tractor with the tiller and mixed the materials. After mixing the materials, I took buckets of material with my smaller tractor and spread them evenly over the back side of the dam by dumping at the top lip and spreading down. I finished by making several rounds with the tractor to compact the surface. You can easily see the difference in the surfaces in these photos and how smooth and nice the sand/clay mix finishes off.

 

[beppington]

Wow, that mixing process sounds like a pain in the butt!!

These pics are the first I can remember where I can tell how high the walls are that you're dealing with :shocked: ... the ones taken from your tractor horizontally, so we have the tractor for reference & can see the steepness of the walls & depth.

 

[jinman]

Wow, that mixing process sounds like a pain in the butt!!

These pics are the first I can remember where I can tell how high the walls are that you're dealing with :shocked: ... the ones taken from your tractor horizontally, so we have the tractor for reference & can see the steepness of the walls & depth.

If I were working with a flat surface, I could put down sand and then clay and come back with the tiller to mix them after spreading, but that ain't happening on these slopes. It is quite the drop off the back of the dam. Once your rear tires leave the flat top of the dam, you're only going in one direction.

I just finished off the rest of the back side of the dam this morning in about 1 hour. Working with that sand/clay mix without rocks is very easy and makes a nice looking surface. I also am getting four tandem dump truck loads of rip-rap delivered today. Three loads are here and he's bringing me one more load of 4"-6" rip-rap. I'm also getting one load of 8"-12" rip-rap to use on the outlet side of my culverts. The hauler said that the larger rock is hard to get because the crusher has more demand for the smaller rock in the oil patch. There's such a demand that he has to go to the crusher and wait in a long line to get loaded. Since I'm close to the crusher, my cost is $320 a load.