Using cement to harden fresh fill mud during months of rain. Developing spring hill campground.
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ต.ค. 2024
- When developing my new campground we needed to continue moving forward as the rainy season sets in here in the Pacific Northwest. I have fresh fill on some sections of my road and it was just swallowing any rock put on it. A friend that works for an excavation company in the area told me that they could keep building roads in the rain by mixing cement straight into the dirt. I decided to give it a try. @Flanagan Homestead
As a Geotecnical Engineer: Cement stabilised soil is a very underutilised tool. There's a lot of science on it, and getting the ideal ratio depends a lot on what soil you have. The uncertainty puts a lot of construction projects off it, but if you just need it to be "good enough", you can't really screw it up. Mix in 5-10% and you are guaranteed an improvement to your soil.
Lime stabilisation for clay soils can be cheaper, but is a considerably more complicated science, depending on soil PH and a bunch of other factors. For DIY, just add more cement and you'll be sweet (up to 20% usually shows improvement before you start running into diminishing returns or bad side effects like cracking).
Thank you for sharing your knowledge on the subject
I would be very interested in lime stabilization process. That’s something you now got me looking into
This simple and cheap idea will help so many countries here in Africa where many countries literally don't have roads.
Thank you thank you thank you for this video! So I have 30 acres I'm developing in deep forest, I have a road base on a hill that is like this and it swallowed my excavator tracks completely. I nearly couldn't get it out, took me hours. I had this idea to mix concrete into the mud to see if it would harden up but I couldn't find ANYONE doing this while searching so I figured it wouldn't work until I found your video. I'm definitely going to try this! I literally have 8 feet of mud on parts of my road it's THAT deep, however it seems only the first 3 feet are really soft as the other 5 feet gets hardened under the weight so I really only need to hardene the top surface area but if this works out for you and I, this should be done WAY more often than it is. Cement is cheaper than loads of rock right now.
good luck on hardening your road
I used old carpet like road cloth then put gravel over that.
Hey, for the next time or other people reading, here's some information i learned. I did some research because im going to do this with field roads near the Frontline in eastern Ukraine.
You have there soil with alot of organic matter, which means your soil is acidic.
Acidic soil is no good for your alkaline cement, it will reduce the hydration.
So if you are in this situation that your soil is already muddy and difficult to work with, you should use calcium oxide and mix it in well. This will hydrate with the water in the soil, heat it and evaporate it. It dries the soil, and lowers the acidity and even more the calcium hydroxide that this reaction produces will stabilize the soil, especially the clay in it forever.
After 48h the calcium oxide has reacted and you can mix in the cement to create soilcrete. The soil is less acidic or even basic and your cement will harden much better and because of the calcium oxide and hydroxide it will also harden faster. Water it mildly, compact it and keep watering it for ideally 28 days so it can harden to its full strength. Of course nobody will water it so long but atleast do a week.
Anyways, thank you for the video, this is where my research started.
Thank you for the added information. It is true we have acidic soil out here. I generally take that into consideration on how my plants will grow but hadn’t factored it in to the effects of cement curing.
As a Geotecnical Engineer: Cement stabilised soil is a very underutilised tool. There's a lot of science on it, and getting the ideal ratio depends a lot on what soil you have. The uncertainty puts a lot of construction projects off it, but if you just need it to be "good enough", you can't really screw it up. Mix in 5-10% and you are guaranteed an improvement to your soil (lower plasticity).
Lime stabilisation for clay soils can be cheaper, and a combination be the best solution, but the exact mix will be hard to work out without soil testing.Lime Stabilisation is a considerably more complicated science, depending on soil PH and a bunch of other factors. For DIY, just add more cement and you'll be sweet (up to 20% usually shows improvement before you start running into diminishing returns or bad side effects like cracking).
Good luck to you and your boys in Ukraine. My grandfather was a Seabee in WWII, military engineering needs to be resourceful to get stuff done with the materials you have on hand.
@@insertphrasehere15 Hey, thank you very much for the feedback, due to heavy military vehicles using the road, we want a strong result, but duo to the nature of these field roads, to be right on, or close to the contact line, processes like continuous soil testing aren't ideal for us. Basically, when it rains, or the soil is muddy we will mix in calcium carbonate which is not the ideal material but we got a good deal on it, and after a day or two come in with the cement. The first field road is about one kilometer long and under constant russian vision. So we just got a pickup so we can have one person stand on the bed and open the bags whilst driving slowly. With the cement we can then at the end come in with shovels, when the car is parked, because it's safer to stand around there without car. All in all, we expect to use calcium carbonate once and the cement once or twice a week as the road in question is the only way into this place and highly used whilst last winter the road turned into a swamp. But we will see, I'd be happy if we use cement only once or twice.
@@SAR_KD Sounds like a good plan.
Tough going to try to dig cement into the road by hand.
Though I suppose that getting Farm machinery like a plow, harrow, and a roller would bring unwanted attention on your guys?
(Even a few passes with a decent plow tractor to get the cement nice and deep would be AWESOME though.)
Otherwise I'd suggest getting some man-portable plow/rototillers to turn up the soil, as it is really important to get that cement down as deep as possible into the soil (if you just do the top layer it will just crumble and the mud underneath will bog down your heavy vehicles).
What is your plan for recompacting the soil afterwards? Pretty important not to skip that step after adding the cement. You might be able to do it with a few passes of a tracked vehicle. Man-portable plate compactors or trailer pulled rollers are all over the place too.
If you want it to be one and done, don't skimp on the cement, and dig it as deep as possible. If you rework the cement it won't be as good as if you do it once, so better to do it good the first time.
@@insertphrasehere15 Hey, yeah, unfortunately machinery gets hit, just recently a yellow front loader got hit near Bakhmut, and the army doesn't run alot of them. We will powder the ground with cement, drive over it and repeat a few times. Only then go in with hand, and repeat the process till satisfied. Hard fucking job but needs done. Budget is also super low we don't really get enough donations to do combat engineer work but ain't nobody else there to do it and the town was cut off from supplies last winter and the Russians almost took it.
Im kinda thinking about trying a plow on a car but my offroader is not in a very good condition and the transporter we got has 90hp. Not sure if that works, it's already difficult to drive through it without any equipment bogging you down even more.
You seem interested, why don't we stay in touch? Some regular feedback from someone more qualified would be really appreciated. This is my username on telegram @AW2001SARKD. Otherwise i have my Instagram linked in my bio, you can message me there. Would be cool!
Looks good I will be trying this soon on my mud path thanks for the idea.
Depending on where you are, just buying lime at a local quarry should be cheaper and just as effective at drying up mud. A lot of construction sites use that method.
Plus that soil is acidic because of the organic matter, the calcium oxide will neutralize and also stabilize the soil.
Yes, lime will most likely work and be cheaper except I live in Maine and they do not use lime here, so it is not available. I use Cement and it works great.
The mix is one bag of cement per 30 square feet. It is recommended to use nothing larger than 1/4 inch and compact (roll) it then water it. Crushed rock with sharper edges is best for strength and compaction. I'm going to build a road 700 feet long after frost is over. Check to see if there is a Harley mixer for rent in your area, it mixes the cement and soil to about 5 inches deep. A vibrating roller is best to rent to compact and because you are going to be a commercial operation with heavier vehicles using this road you want to build it right the first time.
Half your concrete is outside your path of travel! Hope you review the footage
spread it out, disc it in, wet & forget, it works.
GREAT IDEA.... I've got the exact same problem.... where can one buy that type of cement bags? thanks....
I went to my commercial lumber yard. Make sure you get cement, not concrete mix.
Use a log to drag it level.
Good suggestion.
I have 5acres im trying to straighten the road with
2" or 3" gravel wouldn't work?
Unfortunately no. I have been putting 3 inch on it and it just disappears down into the mudd. That section would swallow truckloads.