What driveway material would you use?

[Kendrick]

I'm a fan of geotextile. Used correctly it can save money by reducing the amount of materials. Here's a link to a guide by one manufacturer, Typar. You might also want to check out Nilex or talk to their local office.

I saw some cool stuff a while back. it looks like the quickcreet stepstone patern only 8-10' squares. you can get it in 3 classes. light trafic up to 20k lb. medium 60k lb i think and then heavy @ 80-100k iirc. you fill it in with crusher run i think and insta raoad... the plastic helps spread the weight load so a 6"square foot print from a tire is pushing aginst 1-2' of ground.

 

[dcyrilc]

Not around here, no dirt is added to "crusher run". And really it isn't made from gravel here either..but it might be a regional thing.
The quarry blasts huge chunks of granite out of the pit and trucks them up to the crusher...this is a huge noisy contraption with a wobbling cone inside a cone...the rock gets crushed between the two cones. The "crusher run" is run out a conveyer to a huge pile right next to it where they load the trucks with giant loaders...
I always feel a little strange going in there with my little 5 ton capacity dump trailer and lining up with the 18 wheeler dump trucks:ashamed: Then the loader operator scoops up just a cornerful for my 5 tons...that scoop must hold 25 tons or more!

The same is true here in the NW, but with Basalt rather than Granite.

Crusher Run is the results of first crushing the rock and is cheaper than rock which has been run through screens to sort and size it. It also can vary greatly in size from fines up to 4+".

Rock here is sorted and sold by size using shakers and a series of screens. The smallest is five eights minus (5/. For this they use a screen with 5/8" holes. Anything which falls through the screen is in this catagory. From there they move the remaining material to a screen with 1-1/4" holes. This makes 1-1/4 clean (no fines). From there it goes to a 2" screen (2" clean), then to a 4" screen (2-4), then a 6" screen (4-6), and finally an 8" screen (6-8). There are also sizes of 1-1/4 minus and 2" minus which skip the previous screens so that anything smaller than the stated size is included. Most of the rock sold here includes fines so if they have an abundance of larger rock and are short on a smaller size, they simply run it back through the crusher and resort it.

 

[dcyrilc]

I bought & sold the crushed concrete for awhile when working with my tractor in Florida a few years back. They were tearing-up the slab on a big K-Mart store and they had this huge machine there that crushed it. It did use magnets to grab the metal as the concrete ran by on conveyors - it slung the metal out in one pile and the concrete in another big pile. The "gravel" it made was excellent for driveways etc. but had one flaw - the machine didn't get 100% of the metal out - not ideal for a driveway !! The few I did with it had to be walked and metal picked up.

My experiance here in the NW has been the same. They get most of the metal, but certianly not all of it.

Contractors here also try to sort it as best they can as it costs them more to dump material filled with steel than it does to dump clean concrete. My experiance lies in highway work and we use trackhoes with a huge claw to crush the concrete from bridges etc. as they take them down. They grab and remove the rebar to a seperate pile from the concrete for disposal. I've seen the same thing when concrete buildings are demollished.

When we use recycled concrete for road bed, it often contains crushed brick as well. I know the recyclers get their material from multiple sources, but I have no idea how those other sources are sorted as I have no experiance in that regards.