05 Wall Hands On Demonstration

my first retaining walls and i'm going to start back filling it right so i'm going to get my my excavator out we're going to start dumping sand behind the pile here now this sand has a really nice moisture content so it really kind of locks together pretty well but what i'm doing is i'm just dumping this stuff in the cylinder just filling this cylinder up no compaction no reinforcement this cylinder is just getting dumped in here right the material's just getting dumped in as you can imagine when we take away the outside form here we're gonna lose most of the structural integrity this is so wet that it's holding together but all we have to do is put a tiny load on that and we'll see this stuff slump off now if the sand was a little drier we would see the sand slump off and the fee angle right we would see that angle denoted here on the side but it's wet enough where it's kind of got more of its own composure it's going to hold together a little bit better than a dry sand would so we saw if we don't backfill we end up with an immediate failure it returns back to slope with just a tiny bit of load to it right so now what we're going to do is we're going to introduce backfill that's also got a level of compaction to it okay so we're using the proper size compaction equipment for the job that we're doing we're compacting in lifts of about an inch because that's all this thing is probably going to be able to compact so but again we're scaling our equipment to fit the job requirement here right so we're going to keep filling up our sand you know every scoop and a half or so we're going to compact it on the way up mike you want to see if we can get a paver or a small paver or two all right so here we have that here we have compacted sand right so we've gone up all the way we've compacted it in lifts all the way up as we remove our form we should see this stuff stand pretty well put together right we've got our vertical walls it's staying in place pretty well but when we add a load or a surcharge to this we can see it's starting to slump off right if we add another block well sure we can use this one okay so as we add another block we can see that immediate failure occurs right even though we compacted our material that down pressure was enough to blow out the sides of our retaining wall had we not used any backfill or reinforced backfill and geogrid now what we're going to do is do it the right way we're going to back fill our wall same way we did before we're going to compact in lifts same way we did before but we're just going to introduce these little circles of weed fabric and these denote geogrid and i know i just got done saying never use a geogrid substitute right so you'd never use this behind a wall but for the purpose of demonstration it works really well so we're going to go ahead and set our grid in run a little more sand in there we're gonna go ahead and start compacting this material again so this is the same thing as packing in your two to four or six inch lifts behind the retaining wall right we're running our vibratory plate packer right up against the back side of the wall to achieve our 95 percent of standard proctor so we'll go ahead and introduce some geo grid in here as well go ahead and pack this in i was telling my guys right when you think you're done packing go another five or ten minutes you just can't you can't overdo compaction right you want to make sure that you have proper compaction behind these walls we'll go ahead and do the same thing i'm going to introduce one more layer of grid and then we'll cap this puppy off same process we're just filling up this cylinder with sand as we go up get a little left on the table so i'll take an add a little bit compacting and lifts all the way up until we've reached top grade of the back of our wall now as we pull this thing up we're not going to see the grid lengths yet right you can maybe see a little bit of lip right here where the grid is showing through the face but what we want to do to this now is start start adding a surcharge or a load to it okay so we know that even unreinforced it was able to hold this block up right so let's go ahead and start with something a little bit bigger because this is where we saw failure on the first demonstration this is half a versa block 42 pounds okay so as i kind of wiggle this thing around you should start to see between the layers here you're going to start to see that fee angle appear it's actually kind of manifesting better on the sides and the back here but what we'll see is that a little bit of material around the edges is going to start to shed out between these layers of grid but overall the structural integrity is still there right so we've added 42 pounds let's double our load let's double our surcharge we've got another 42-pound block on here right we'll go ahead and stack this on here as long as we get this on fairly even this thing is still able to support that load right that blowout's not happening anymore the only thing that we changed between those for the second and the third demonstration is that we added these layers of grid in here right and even as i kind of play with the outside of this and i start shaving away sand we start to see those mini fee angles emerge right those little failure planes that we talked about you saw a lot of slides up there that kind of showed what that would look like so we see those failure planes start to manifest around the side of the sand now we could probably stack these blocks up until we break the table to be honest with you i've never broken one but if you talk to chad he'll tell you that he has because guys are always like you couldn't put another block on there and we never want to turn down a challenge do we so we're always trying to put on more weight but the bottom line is is that introducing just a little bit of soil reinforcement between these layers of sand has taken this from failing at a 40 40 pound load to all of a sudden being able to double that and still stand up to the load now even after i shaved around the edges just to prove the point let's put one more block on there see what happens somebody say don't do it you're crazy okay so you can tell i'm not i'm not holding this block up at all i'm just kind of stabilizing it so that it doesn't fall on me but this little column of sand because it's got the geo grid soil reinforcement in there is able to carry three times more than three times the load that we initially introduced in soft failure with right so the same principle is at work behind your retaining walls so not that it's magic but it's kind of magic right and this is why i kind of i like to show my new hires this because it just drives home how important the geo grid is and why you can't skimp on grid lengths or grid quality or the gradation of the grid you got to make sure and follow what your engineer specs for your wall all right we'll just go ahead and slide this stuff back a little bit so that was pretty cool [Music] there's never any questions on the sand portion does anybody have a question i didn't think so okay we'll jump into hands-on so we told you that one block can do a lot of different jobs right one block wears a lot of different hats you can do a lot of different things with the same standard retaining wall block because it's a solid core block we've got some of these that are pre-split back here mike if you want to start setting those blocks out we're going to need six blocks kind of lined up right here i'm going to give them a quick hand chris so we've got this block here that we've split in half whether you use a chisel or a hydraulic splitter or guillotine splitter you can achieve a really nice manufactured edge by just splitting this block in half we're going to use these let's try to set them up right right along here we're going to use them for for this demonstration and then we're going to move them over a little bit so what we're setting up here first is we're going to set up an outside radius okay you guys remember one of the one of the properties that verselock has is that you can turn a maximum of an eight foot outside radius or an outside curve now that means i don't know if you can see this here but that means that this area at the back of the block is tight up against the next block okay that when you have no gap or no air between the front or the back that's the maximum radius at which this block can turn the reason that's so important again is that as you build up your radius gets smaller and smaller every row you stack up eventually your blocks are going to start to separate at the face like that okay so in order to combat that like i said some guys will make a jig right they'll have a jig that might be a half inch quarter inch 3 8 inch but what that'll tell them is that when they have that amount of distance back here that they're set up at a 9 foot 10 foot 11 12 foot radius whatever it might be you've got a jig so that your base can be wider than that eight feet so you'll end up at eight feet at the very top of your wall okay and again you want to make sure you do that because otherwise your blocks will start to separate at the face on you like that so now that we've shown the outside curve let's go ahead and move these around a little bit we're going to go ahead and show you the inside five and a half foot radius i told you on the outside radius sometimes i'll use my pinky wedge right i'll take my pinky finger and if that fits between the back of the blocks i know i'm good to stack up to about three feet like that right so that's my predetermined pinky jig whenever you can use something simple fast easy and effective take that opportunity now what we're going to do is set up at an outside radius and the reason that the engineers at versalock have said that five and a half feet is your max inside radius is because at some point here these guys are going to become so separated that on a quarter bond the back of the block is going to be sitting on nothing it's going to be floating in the air right so you want to respect that five and a half foot inside radius capability now what we'll do is straighten this wall out let's go ahead and grab a string line that'll work if it we just need one section of it and then i'll need a couple of string line holders that's fine perfect cool all right mike you want to give me a quick hand or chris when you're done with that so uh typically this string line is going to be spiked in right you're going to have a 10 inch or 12 inch spike that you're going to knock into your class 5 base now as you pull this thing straight you can see here that along the back side you're going to be able to come in and make these blocks even with your string line and again you do not want this string line to make contact with the back of the block right if your string line is touching the backs of any of these blocks it's going to mean that the string line is deflecting and whenever the string line deflects off the back of a block it's going to cause you to build a curved wall we like laser beams right we like them to be straight and perfect and if you want a straight perfect wall you're going to keep this string line spaced off the back by again you can certainly use your pinky wedge here all we're looking for is uniformity whether it's a half inch quarter inch 3 8 whatever it is you want to make sure that as you as you fit your finger in behind this block wall that the string line is the same distance off both sides of the block it's as simple as that and that's how you make a wall nice and straight straight walls are difficult to maintain because every row you may see a little bit of deflection or deviation which means that you may want to take your six foot level and bump it up against the back of this wall right all you're doing is you're checking to make sure that you're staying nice and straight as you stack up now let's assume that we've got this base in we know that it's nice and straight we're going to go ahead and set our first block in so we've got this handy lifter that i know we gave a few of them away just recently here these lifters fit right into the first and fourth pin holes and as you go ahead and set these blocks up on top of each other one thing i always tell my guys to do is give them a shimmy right so you're going to take these blocks and shimmy them back and forth a little bit it does two things for you one it cleans off any little bit of concrete slough or slump that might attach itself to the top or the bottom of one of these blocks second thing it does for you is as you're stacking these walls up it tells you if you've got any deviations because as you're sliding this block back and forth if you hit a hard lip you know air brakes boom if you hit a hard lip like that it tells you that you have a problem with a lower row right your level is off a little bit for some reason so i always have my guys skim these blocks off back and forth a little bit before we pin them now let's go ahead and let's pin our first block cool thank you so what mike brought here is he's got two different styles of of pins we've got a standard versa lock pin right this is going to be used for our standard six inch tall block and then we have what's called a snap off pin this is what you're going to use to pin together the accent blocks in the mosaic panel so we see behind us here we've got some four inch tall blocks these snap off pins are going to be used for that system right so you can just kind of pop that top off like that now you've got a shorter pin that's going to fit down inside of the accent block without having it poke out through the top and cause a problem for you now as you're pinning these you're going to notice and i'm going to set this up for failure here you're going to notice that if you try to drop this pin in that sometimes it's going to hit the top section of the block you're trying to pin it into there is this section right down the middle where we need to make a split to modify this block for corners so as we're doing this you have to bear in mind that you may not be using the first and fourth pinhole every time sometimes you might be using the second pinhole and this this pinhole is still going down into this block below and then this pin is going to drop down into this block and remember that's what we said we need to have the block pin into two blocks below for structural integrity right so this block is not going to be able to move independent it's going to have to be pinned into these two blocks below and that's kind of the method behind pinning these things and that's why we're able to pin at a variable bond add a quarter bond all the way up to the half bond okay so let's go ahead we're going to do geogrid on the outside 45 so let's go ahead and start setting up our inside or i'm sorry our outside 90 degree corner so we'll take a few of these blocks we'll just set them up right here i've got one down there already you know actually though i'd rather use the other side okay so what we have here is we're going to show you how to do an outside 90 and i know it's already up on the slide but we're just going to show you in real life what it's like to put together this 90 degree corner so mike's going to slide this block over to meet with this block as i slide this block into this corner right now there's one thing you want to hand me the speed square so as you're setting this 90 up you can use the speed square on the back side of these blocks on the manufactured edge to make sure that you have a perfect 90. we were only off by about a degree or two there but we'll go ahead and set up a perfect 90 degree angle by using a simple plastic speed square on the back side of our blocks now we kind of talked about how you set up these outside 90s let's go ahead and put the next block on there yep but let's set that on there first so remember we talked about finishing details separating yourself from the diy jobs from the lawn mowing guys uh this is one of those details that we already covered but i just want to show you in real life here you really do see this ribbing you see that on the top of these blocks manifested on both sides so this is going to be a situation where i'm going to flip these over and now as we stack this thing up you're not going to see that it just gives you a nice finished look and here's a little tip for you as you're splitting these blocks in half stack them left and right right so you're going to have one stack of all left side one stack of all right side it's just going to make it easier to figure out as you're stacking corners and pillars which side of the block you need to use for corners it's going to alternate you're going to use left then right then left then right for pillars you're going to go all the way around with all left on one row and then use all rights on the second row okay so as we stack this thing out let's go ahead and slide this block back now we can slide these over and we're going to go ahead and create an inside 90. if you want to start filling this in a little bit yep just like that and again we're going to be using a block adhesive here right the corners are going to be glued the rest of this can all be pinned at that three-quarter inch setback so let's stop right here what chris did is he started setting up our wing wall what he did was he set this block up so that it's far enough back that we're going to be able to overlap on top of it okay and again we're trying to tie these two walls together so that they don't move independently of one another but so that they're dependent on one another right so we want to have kind of a marriage here in the in the very corner where now our next block is going to overlap onto this wing wall there we go and this would all be glued at the corner now if we had the overlap here this block if it was pushed over just a little further could certainly pin into this block below it but we are going to use an adhesive back here on the corner to attach these two blocks right so as we're stacking north we know that um the block row underneath isn't going to be sliding around on us let's go ahead and set that guy right there cool so now the only modification that we've had to make to this block is to split one block in half and now we've been able to make an outside 90 and an inside 90 by just using these units as they are without any modification right we've only split one block in half to make the z wall now let's go ahead and grab a couple of these outside 45 pieces i'll take that one okay and i just wanna set this up here for the camera and for you guys to see the only two things that we had to do to this block is we split a 45 degree angle off of the corner and typically we like to see this section saw cut right they split this one but if i was in the field doing this i would want to see a saw cut here and you're going to see why in just a second as that block comes into the other block there it becomes immediately obvious that there's some gapage here right so on a job site that doesn't fly for me i would be taking one of these nice ash blades and cutting a clean vertical line on my outside 45. but for the purpose of demonstration we already assumed that we have level base we assume that we have good conditions so we're making some assumptions we're going to assume that we would also make a saw cut there rather than a split right so let's yep let's go ahead and stack up another one wow dangerously close to perfect there huh so again on these outside 45s we're going to be putting a little bit of glue between these two blocks but this block will pin down into the block below it over here okay so you can still pin these systems it's just going to be a little bit of adhesive just to help you sleep better just to hold this stuff together nice and tight let's go ahead and keep on going we're going to keep on stacking this thing out a little bit put another block or two on top of there do we have a cobble yeah let's grab one of those perfect okay so what we've done here is we've got a z wall that's gone from an outside 90 to an inside 90 and now we're cutting an outside 45 degree angle and now we're going to cut to an inside 45 okay so all we have to do is have these two blocks meet at the corner we've got our cobble block which is a half unit this is half a retaining wall block and this is going to be our jumper we're going to set our jumper up in here again this block is going to be adhesive we're going to use block adhesive to be locking this into place it won't pin so pull this guy over so it's making good contact yeah that's it there we go perfect maybe just for fun let's throw two more blocks up on top here just to show this inside 45 and while those guys are doing that see i know we've got some geogrid over here well you know what let's go ahead and use this right here as a as a demonstration uh in place of actual grid so when replacing our geo grid sometimes there's going to be a situation like what we have here and we see that we've got geogrid that's going to be interfacing with itself or as we run these layers back go ahead and move this guy that's probably a bad spot as we're running these layers of grid back in our 45 degree outside angle here what we can see is that these grid lengths are going to come on come and make contact with each other right now we talked before about how grid is not designed to grab onto itself it has to grab into dirt or soil so what we want to do here is create a soil separator what ncma requires for test takers is a three inch separation between layers of grid okay so where these where these grid sections are laid back in their direction of strength and you know i'm going to be very careful as i put my block on here to keep my grid back far enough so that you don't see it at the face okay so right now you can't see the grid at the face but it's still making a solid contact here between these blocks the tension is holding it in place to some extent there right we just need to make sure that as these two layers of grid intersect that we get soil between them three inches is what ncma requires now if this is towards the top of the wall we also want to make sure that we have at least six inches of material on top of this grid right if this is the very top of the wall and the engineer called for geo grid on this on the very top layer like this we want to make sure that we get at least six inches of material over the top of this geo grid as we're compacting and that's just to make sure that it can operate the way that it's designed to do so um let's see do we have any questions up till now on the geo grid or any of the angles or curves cool i'm sweating already up here i don't know if it's the lights or just moving a couple blocks but i'm out of shape um so we've got our z walls we've got our 45s now we're going to integrate some steps and i told you already that steps are kind of one of the things that verselock does really well because they are a flat block we're gonna run out of block here pretty soon we should probably start moving some of these over okay now the way that we're doing our steps is as a separate component we aren't really tying the two together in this case so this block here is actually going to go on the outside our first stair riser i'm actually going to set back and you can see here that i've set this block back a couple of inches and the reason for that well twofold one is you may be meeting up with a patio or a walkway but it's really so that as the stair tread comes out and you have that eyebrow it doesn't create a trip hazard or it's not an ankle buster right because if we push this block out to be even with the face of our wall as we attach a tread with an eyebrow to this it's going to hang out past the face of our wall right so it's just one of those things that you can do to make your job more streamlined set this thing back a little bit so that as we cap our stairs we don't have the capstone sticking way out past the face of the wall hitting people in the ankle and causing problems yeah sure so this is one way that you can do it right you can do it one paper length if you'd like to where we're in setting a paver there and then we're going to go ahead and stack our first two stair treads up now this particular design we're going to try to do a partial exposed step okay so let's go ahead and stack up two more behind here perfect there we go okay so now we can grab a couple of these standard blocks and let's go ahead and stack up the second riser of this staircase there we go we're going to have a little bit of overlap and we can zoom in on this but uh joe set this up so that we're going to get a little bit of overlap onto the block below it the front of this block is actually resting on the back of the block below it here that's just again to create a level of bond that's going to give you more structural integrity it's going to lock everything together so that these blocks don't move independent of one another right we're going to use adhesive i would drop a bead below the front of this and i would drop a bead towards the back and glue this all together at that point it's built to spec the engineers are going to be happy we can go ahead and add one more cobble piece over here i suppose perfect cool so you know would it take us about five minutes to stack up these two treads and assuming that you have your base material done correctly down there it's really this easy on site once the compaction and the leveling is done under here it really is just stacking glue right so it goes really quickly what we'll do here is we'll go ahead and why don't we start to uh cap these stairs we're going to do it two different ways we'll grab that that bullnose corner there thank you now this is something that uh has been pre-made we've used it at a couple of the seminars obviously but these are our bullnose pavers mitered across the corners so that we have a finished edge on two faces here let's go ahead and throw down a couple more now we're going to switch over to the weathered ones so what we're doing here guys is we've got um we've got the bullnose treads we just want to show because we're using a weathered block here that really it's just an aesthetic difference between using a weathered bullnose tread compared to a we really uh well we really could slide this over a little bit to accommodate that let's go ahead and do that a little more a little shake little shake and bake okay cool so we got this to fit pretty nicely now i would always take a straight edge and run across the face of these to make sure that they're going to be nice and straight across here but you can see now why we set that first stair tread back right it's so that we're not hitting on these treads as we walk by the wall it's all nice and evenly lined up let's go ahead and use our broke face treads to cap the next tread or the next riser now the reason that we wanted to use a broke face tread on the top is because sometimes the top stair is leading up to a patio right now if you have a six centimeter paver that you're using up on your patio the bull nose is gonna work great 2 and 3 8 inches bull nose is what you want to use however if you're using a slate stone or a euro stone or a decora stone application that's a seven centimeter paver more like two and three quarters inches in height so that's where it's really nice to be able to just split the face of these blocks and create a rough texture that matches your block right and then it's also going to match the height of the paver behind it and if you look here you can see that it makes a difference we're using a seven centimeter paver behind this here so it matches the height of our tread if we had used a shorter paver there'd be a trip hazard there and i think we actually have one more right behind you there yeah that it's right by your foot there mike we'll just go ahead and throw that up on there so it looks finished okay the next thing we want to do is uh as part of this design we sold we up sold a pillar or a column right so we know from the stuff that we've already seen that a pillar is super easy to build all we have to do is split blocks in half this is where it gets to be really important to separate left from right we did that as we stack these up we set all the right hand blocks on one side and all the left hand blocks on the other side we did that so we didn't have to look stupid in front of everybody trying to figure out which side goes on which row because as you're stacking up each row is going to be all left and then all rights and then all left's and then all rights again right so we're going to separate those out as we stack them what happened to our left right thing here [Laughter] some somebody messed with our mojo here um so all we're doing with this pillar is we're chasing our tail around again right we're going to try to create bond with each row that we stack up i like to use a square or some sort of a piece of equipment to make sure that we're stacking these things square but once again there are two manufactured edges that are going to meet when we stack these pillars up so you can look at that gap to kind of decide whether or not you're perfectly square or not that's uh i i highly suggest everybody invests in a nice pair of uh boots that have a toe wedge included on the tip that way if you have to kick a few over you can just use your toe wedge along with your pinky jig all right so we're going to stack this up a couple of rows we'll go we'll go one row higher after this one i think let's go up three one really nice thing about versalock is that because you're able to use the same standard block to create half splits and back split blocks you can kind of seamlessly transition between traditional retaining wall applications in freestanding wall applications right so that's one thing that we're going to do here on the corner well you guys are doing that i'm gonna go ahead and get this freestanding wall started let's go ahead and grab a couple of those standard freestanding blocks i want to point something out here what we have is um the freestanding block and you want to set that down mike that thing looks heavy um the freestanding block is our traditional retaining wall block with the back two inches split off of it right it's not a special unit that you have to order this is the standard block unit it's just got the back end of it split off so that it has a matching face to the front here okay so what we've done is called an off-center split this is a back split block freestanding backsplit block that has also been split off center we didn't split it right down the middle because in order to get any level of bond with a freestanding application we have to do an off center split and you'll see what i mean by that so let's flip this guy over so we don't see those rib lines right we'll flip this guy around okay so what we have here is a freestanding wall that is now flush on the inside and the outside right there's no gap between these blocks so we'll go ahead and stack up our next off center split behind here and you're going to see why it's so important to do an off-center split now because if you look right here at the back you can see that the next block that we're going to stack on this is going to overlap over two blocks what that means is that this is never going to have a tendency to separate or lean forward on you as you're building a freestanding wall if there was no bond there there would be a chance that these things could separate from the main portion of the wall so we have to do an off-center split now we talked about being able to pin on variable bond but we don't have four inches here right there's no way that's four inches so this is one of those situations where we're going to have to cut a block in a slug we never want to cut anything smaller than four inches so here we're going to use a five inch slug okay we'll pop this in right behind there you can see now we've got more bond and actually the camera is showing the side where we have a lot less bond on this side we have at least four inches of bond over here okay so as we're stacking this thing up you know and maybe i'm just going to reverse this despite the fact we're going to show ribs because i want to drive home the point that we can create or get back to almost a quarter bond by cutting a slug in here right so now you see we've got a good overlap there now we don't necessarily have to do anything else to stay on like a quarter bond as we pin these there as we uh glue this wall back let's go ahead and throw one more block up here one more freestanding block there we go cool so now we've got all kinds of different elements here with any other manufacturer you'd have to call and order a special corner units you'd have to call and order special stair units you may even have to order special 45 units if they even manufacture something like that but with versalock we've got one block that we did all these different jobs with freestanding outside 90s pillars stairs multi-angles curves all done under the same umbrella with the same single block by just making a few simple modifications i've been beating up upselling all day so let's talk about something that we can do to add a little bit of aesthetic interest to one of these projects we're going to go ahead and add a band of black through our freestanding wall this is something that i do quite regularly on my projects i might add um i might add a contrasting color to my wall now this is the sake you know for the sake of uh demonstration if this was on somebody's home project we would probably be mitering these corners in to do this banding right but for the sake of demonstration we would also be using an adhesive on this thing we'd be gluing these things down and then setting a block on top of it to go ahead and hold that load in whenever was that yep so what joe's got here if you just show that to the camera this is going to be our mitered corners for this now one really nice thing about adding a row of banded block through here is that it naturally lends itself to another upsell maybe you want to add some lights you want to do some led lighting add some banding you know two birds one stone we've done now an accent band through here we can use this channel that we've created between the pavers to actually integrate some lighting into this project pretty cool so now we've downlit our entire wall the other cool thing about the pavers is that between the chamfers here is a great place to run that wire and so you've got kind of a natural conduit here you don't have to do much fabrication to add a light let's go ahead and set that three-piece capstone up on here see how that works out hercules okay we'll try to get that on there fairly evenly it probably needs to come forward a little bit huh and my way a little bit okay cool okay cool so you know very little additional effort was required here but now we've got something that's that's well above standard it's superior to all the cookie cutter stuff that everybody else is doing you know you've thought outside the box in this down lighting i think is really doing a good job of selling us too on why we're going to flip our blocks upside down right so that we don't see these channels in here if this was somebody's job we would of course be flipping that block over especially if we're going to downlight that area and make that a highlight area but really nice aesthetic to that all of a sudden right all we have to do is add banding in a contrasting cap this is one of urslock's new coping caps this year this is actually a faux natural stone cap or a coping piece they've done a really nice job making improvements over the years to this mix where this looks just like snapped blue limestone to me i mean it's incredible how how realistic these coping stones can get now willow does a great job with these this looks very natural so now we're going to talk about the pillar we're going to integrate the same the same upsell to our pillar okay now for the sake of continuity if we were doing a patio down here i would imagine that we would be matching this accent band that we're doing through our freestanding wall right we'd be tying these components together so that it looks planned so it doesn't look like an afterthought you always want to be thinking about ways to make your colors uh jive between different components right so if you're gonna do an accent that's black over here you may do an accent in the patio that's black but for the sake of demonstration we're actually doing a light accent row through this now you can see that in this case we have gone ahead and mitered these corners together to give it a really nice finished look and again part of what we're doing here today is trying to show you different variables or different uh approaches different ways to do things once again there's always you know going to be a different way to peel an orange one may not be better than the other but it's important to know what's out there what kind of methodology is available to you and so for this case we're going to go ahead and switch up the color of our pillar accent because we're going to use a black cap on top so we're kind of reversing that contrast like i said before high contrast designs are really what's in right now everybody likes that black white contrast right whenever you can have a light color next to a dark color it makes it pop it makes it that much better so once again we mentioned that with a with a with the pillar 20 by 20 pillar you end up with a 4x4 conduit up the center so you can run your electrical wires up through the pillar and then you can add some nice led features like what we have right here um are there any questions on the freestanding or pillar applications awesome awesome okay we've talked about the geo grid we've got the inside outside 90s done here um talked about upselling always be using an opportunity to uh to elevate yourself over you know the competition it's like i said before we might all be some at some level we're competitors but at some level we're all working together here too right we're trying to keep our industry uh we're trying to keep a high level of quality for the entire industry industry-wide that's why we do these educational seminars so that everybody's on the same page we all know there's there's a method to the mayhem right so use these opportunities to upsell you know whether it's weathered block accent bands through the seat walls maybe it's a different colored capstone always be thinking about ways to upsell your project before we head out we'll just quickly cap this mosaic wall that we have built over here because there is one thing on this that i want to show as well although the camera may not be able to see it at this point um yeah we built we built a pretty nice divider while there didn't we um for our mosaic wall we're just going to slap some caps up on this thing show you how to do the eyebrow yeah that's probably a good idea joe we'll stack that down a little bit we talked about devil's in the details right it's the little things that matter the small changes that you make that set you apart from the homeowner diy type youtube projects right so instead of just ending this retaining wall with this manufactured edge and what i say by end is i'm talking about over on this side right here and i think the camera can kind of get in there we don't necessarily want to show this manufactured edge to the capstone same as we don't like to show the manufactured edge on our retaining wall blocks super simple things that we can do to hide that and make it look much more finished now what we've done here is gone ahead and figured out ahead of time what size our splits need to be so in order to do that as we set this block in here what we're going to do is we're going to measure this distance from the corner to where our step up is so say it's 34 inches we're going to divide that by 3 and try to come up with a median number so that we end up with even block segments we don't want to have a little teeny slug cut into this that makes everything you've done up till this point almost worthless to to inject small slugs into this so ahead of time we figured out that we were going to need like a 10 inch split here right so we've gone ahead and we've split this block off on this side so that we're finished on two faces right and then as we marry these two and push forward to do a little bit of eyebrow action we've used a half split on the end here right this half split now has finished texture on both the face and the side so we use that to our advantage now and we're gonna go ahead and set this block up on top of that block we've got a little bit of extra overhang there and i think it's because we didn't do quite enough on this other side this one was set up to have about an inch and a half eyebrow but whatever you want to do doesn't have to be an inch and a half it could be an inch it could be three quarters whatever you want to do for your eyebrow the only thing that we have to do to make this corner and cap this corner is we have to make this split and we have to make one cut we've got this block here this capstone all we've done here is taken our speed square scored a line and then cut the side off so that it's going to go ahead and butt right up to our corner piece now there is a top and a bottom to these cap stones you can always tell because the front of the cap is going to have a little bit of a bevel to it if your as detail-oriented as i know you are that might bother you a little bit you certainly can take a chisel along here and kind of recreate just a little bit of bevel there if you want to right just to keep that level of continuity there as you're capping these things because of course as mr and mrs smith are walking outside to look at their wall the cap is kind of the first thing they see right so spend some time on the capstones and make sure the cuts are clean and the splits are in good places make sure you don't have weird little slugs put in there all you have to do is figure out your total width and then divide it and you'll find out exactly what size these two splits need to be so that they are at least comparable in size so you don't have a huge slug over here on the corner and then a tiny slug over here on the other side any questions on capping awesome okay well i'm sweating pretty good right about now um is there anything else that you wanted to cover on the hands-on portion i think we've covered it is there any questions overall from the seminar today that you didn't get to ask before that you want to cover now [Music]

Channel: VERSA-LOK Midwest

Views: 8,004

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Id: Ta4djQLpe4o

Length: 52min 59sec (3179 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 04 2022