Don't attempt BASE PREP until you see this video! Base Prep basics to make your project last.

hey let's talk about some basic base prep the side profile here is of a typical residential paving stone installation just pedestrian traffic for four to six inches of road base on top of a well compacted subgrade one-inch abetik sand and our heavy stone the subgrade should be a nice clay type soil that would be like a load-bearing soil devoid of any organic material that might decompose and cause it sink there's a viewpoint here of looking at the compaction this is of a typical three-quarter inch road base a well graded material that has large medium small particles in it that compact and fill-in off little holes in the gravel once it's compacted to make it a nice hard surface so we always want to do no more than four inch lifts and that usually compacts down about an inch as you can see so to get to six inches of road base I'm doing three lifts and just making sure that each one is very well compacted and we'll also look at using actual vibrating plate compactor which you can see how that works so they're definitely the most useful way to get base prep going on like a paving stone patio like this one will be so we lay out our Heights excavate to our depth measuring out the height of the road base and a paver just gonna scrape it all down here and you can see in a sec here we're gonna start add a very thin first lift so that the subgrade gets compacted with it it's a little mucky out here so we wanted to just make sure that the compactor was gonna roll over it really nice and you get a compact it not just drag mud around so from there once that's really well done usually we do three passes going multiple directions minimum depending on how its feeling usually to do more than that just to make sure each layer is very well compacted and we're just going to do another lift here and it's tidy it up before we get into a final screen height I'm gonna do a more in-depth video on screening but here's some basics I'm a few different techniques I at least like to use a streamline a level or two guy for and get that top layer broad-based really I spot a fine it just makes the installation a lot easier when it comes to screening our sand after and just yeah gets a really nice flat surface to work out with you just want a clean sheet perfectly graded to your streamlines so take a little bit of time and get some detail and use a level or a straightedge and fine-tune it I know a lot of companies will just use a landscape break and get it pretty close and then just adjust their height with their sand if it's within a quarter inch or half an inch might is fine this extra step just adds a little bit more accuracy so I take an extra hour maybe in the day and set up some screed rails in this case or it could just use the level and work to my string lines and just make sure that I'm at the exact right height for whatever material I'm installing that talked to us keeping in mind that whenever we compact the surface will drop depending on the thickness of the layer could drop so much as an inch or as little as half an inch to a quarter inch just depends on what your last lift height was so there's some basic screening just with that level and we'll get a nice flat surface now to lay our bars on and get to work on our paving stones if the subgrade is not ideal ideally you dig down as far as you need to to get to good load-bearing soil but if you're a little bit worried about it you can use a geotech cloth making sure it's overlapped about 12 inches and compact your row base on top of that and lifts but that will help stabilize it here's a basic wall basse prep so I already compacted one or two layers I'm adding a left or two of row base and I'm just gonna use my level again just to making sure it's nice and flat so it makes my start in my block wall which is what this is gonna be really really nice and easy so I'm not adjusting the road base too much after this just some minor tweaking so once again take a little bit of time use a string line use a level use a straight flat board whatever you need to do to make it easy on yourself just make the installation a little bit more and that's just a hand tamper there pretty standard you just have to make sure that you're using a hand tamper that you actually put the work in and get the base compacted as it should be so there's a nice easy installation for a wall and once again the side profile of a paving stone is solution let me know if you have any questions talk to you soon and like and subscribe to see you all the rest of my videos more coming at you

Channel: Hardscape Canada Training inc.

Views: 832,946

Keywords: base prep, roadbase, gravel, landscaping, hardscaping, pavingstones, screeding, DIY

Id: tfDEOIAIUwQ

Length: 5min 33sec (333 seconds)

Published: Sat May 23 2020