Dry Pouring a Concrete Slab for my Golf Net

hello welcome to your simple golf swing I'm Matt you may notice I'm dressed a little bit different today and that's because I'm going to be doing some work on my hitting area my little platform that I have back here for my personal driving range now what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be converting this to the wood platform that it is right now into a concrete slab and I'm going to be using something that's called the dry pour method now there may be some concrete people out there that are going to cringe when they see me do this dry pour method but I've seen a lot of videos done on this on YouTube you can check it out it's it's a sound good method for pouring concrete now I want to talk a little bit about why I'm doing this why I'm converting this and why I built this wooden structure in the first place I'm doing this in hopes that I might Inspire some of you guys out there to build your own little Platforms in your own little setup like I've got here in the in the backyard so you can work on your swing more often and with a lot more convenience than going to the range or whatever when I originally put this in I wasn't entirely convinced that this is where I wanted this setup to be in my yard I had just recently had a pool put in and put down a bunch of sod and everything in I wasn't sure is this where I want this permanently well it's been almost three years now and I've decided Yep this works out fine it hasn't gotten in in the way and and it has not gotten in the way of our activities out in our backyard or anything it's not an eyesore can't be seen from the uh the street or anything another thing that that caused me to use wood in my original plan here was the pouring of the concrete now a 5x6 area here isn't quite enough to have poured concrete delivered it's just not cost effective and a lot of people a lot of cement companies won't even do it for such a small area but another thing is hand mixing it's going to cause it's going to take me about somewhere around 20 60 pound bags and if you know anything about concrete you know when you're mixing a bag of concrete by yourself you're only going to be able to do about a five gallon bucket at a time so you've got to do that 20 times and you've got to do it quick because those first few bucket fulls or bags that you've mixed up that you've poured in there it's going to start to cure you know pretty quickly and you're probably not going to get all the way done with those 20 bags before those first few bags are hardening and and that just makes it more difficult to work with uh so that kind of deterred me and you know I looked at all kinds of different ways better ways to mix bags by hand doing it yourself and then when I came across the dry pour method I watched a lot of videos on it uh people are getting great results that was my answer once I once I saw that that's when I decided okay it's time this wood when I put this wood down again I didn't know how permanent it was going to be so I didn't I didn't go through the expense of of buying pressure treated you know wood I just I just bought some basic two by sixes they're getting old now they're starting to not really rot but they are weakening I've got some areas that I can feel in this pad that I've built that are kind of starting to Sag a little bit so it's time for me to go ahead and dismantle this and pour a permanent concrete slab now I'm only going to go three inches deep I don't need to go real deep because this is just it just needs to support my weight and my swing in this pad you know cushions or this this mat that I have is a really high quality mat and it cushions the blow of the the golf club so I'm only going to go about three inches I'm going to do the dry pour not gonna use any rebar no no sense no reason to use that I'm going to use high strength say Crete concrete mix and it should work out pretty well so I'm going to take you along with me on my journey so you can decide whether or not this is something you want to do in your own backyard first thing that I have to do is I have to dismantle my existing platform so anyways that's what we're up to let's get underway okay so I have my form I've got the ground leveled out I use my little tamper here to to Tamp it especially around the edges this is going to be three inches thick it is six feet six feet wide and it's five foot four inches deep and there's a reason I went 5-4 is because my mat is five or four four deep this will give me a foot at the end to be able to place my bucket of balls and place money golf bag got a nice level spot so we're ready to go I'm about ready to start the dry pour and here's what it looks like if you see I've got it off center from my heating area because I want to be able to hit into the center of the net area so the driver will be all the way to the right side and then the irons will be in the middle so this should work out pretty good it's about where I got I want it and it's about where I had my wooden platform all right so at this point in the video what I intended to do is I had intended to show you how I actually poured the dry Concrete in and how I did the screeding I did a rookie mistake I thought I hit the record button I went ahead and I filled in my entire frame I did all the screening and then I went back to replay the video and I found out that I didn't hit record so rookie mistake so what I'm going to do is after my big reveal of the finished product then what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk you through that skating process and and the pouring process I'll just explain to you and and kind of show you how I did it um it's not something I could go back and redo to videotape it because you know once you pour that stuff down and screed it there's there's no taking it back up and and redoing it for videotaping so apologize for that there are some great videos out there that show you the entire dry pour method I'm just trying to show you how my project here turned out and it's kind of my golf specific one uh so anyways let me take you on to show you what it looks like after I did the screening and the steps that I had to take after that okay so this is what it looks like right now I just got done filling in the whole form screeding it and now I'm going to put some finishing touches on it before I get it wet I'm gonna go over it with a roller paint roller and do some edging so far so good looks all right doesn't have to be perfect this is a launch pad for my time this is giving it a nice texture and this isn't making it real smooth what it's doing is it's kind of giving it almost a sandpaper texture so that it won't be slippery at all and I'm just living the weight of the roller do it not pushing down at all I don't want to add anything to it go back and forth a few times I don't care much about that back Edge that's that clumped up area there is beyond the wooden frame so get this really nice like this [Music] here in an hour again and then after that I took a water actual excellent put some water on it right now we're just messy and that should do it for the initial then we'll come back in an hour and put some more water on it okay so I've done a couple of mistines is starting to harden up on the top real good so now um you know after I did the mistines I washed my truck to get all the dust off of it went took a shower ate some dinner it's been about an hour now and uh it's curing well hard on the top so now if we switch to shower and according to the instructions we should water this two times we should water it once every hour but water it two times for every inch of thickness so I've got um three inches of thickness here so six waterings here in Florida I don't know if I need to wait a full hour between the waterings I see a couple of the imperfections that's fine like I said this is just gonna put my golf mat on this my my artificial turf heating thing and uh it'll be fine it's nice and level that's what I care about the levels just wet it down real good and what this will do is that dry cement down below underneath it it's just gonna soak this thing up kind of a wicker effect okay I can come out here in 30 minutes and rye and that concrete down below the concrete down below we'll start to suck this water up and it'll eventually make its way all the way to the Bottom now I thought about doing this kind of in layers and you know put down a bottom layer first get it wet then put some more on top and get it wet but one of the guys that does this a lot online he's got a lot of videos on this he says that if you put this stuff down even on wet ground the concrete is gonna pull that moisture up towards the top and when you go to do the screeding it's going to cause some problems because you're going to have wet spots so he recommends that you keep it completely dry until you've got it set up the way you want it and then you start wetting it um one caution that I I forgot to mention when I started was do this with wearing a mask it was windy today so I was able to pour the concrete and all the dust just kind of flew off that way so I didn't wear a mask but I recommend you wear a mask you don't want to breathe this this dust at all and I rinse off my my ball thing it's got concrete all over it but but anyways there you have it so my plan here is I'm going to come out here instead it's supposed to be every hour come out and water it again three inches thick so that would be six waterings um so I'm going to do that throughout the evening and probably gonna wait a good 48 hours before I actually take the forms off you can take them off after 24 hours but I just I want to be sure everybody else online that is doing this is doing it with a quick reek Quikrete and that's not available in my area I had to use say Creek but from what I understand as long as you're using a portland-based cement mix or concrete mix you should be good and sacred is Portland based I checked so it should work out there you have it we'll uh we'll check on this in another hour and put some more water on it I'll keep doing that throughout the evening and then I'll wait a couple of days I'll remove the forms and I'll show you guys what it looks like at the end see you in a bit [Music] okay here's a moment of truth I'm gonna start taking off the mold and the frame here I can get my drill to cooperate with me give me problems yesterday foreign off and on all day and it should be a good place now with this thing [Music] [Music] oh look at that [Music] so here we have it nice and wet all the way through to the bottom that looks nice I'm very pleased with this come over here in the sunshine look at that is nice still moist all the way through gonna probably although I'm eager to hit on it probably gonna wait a couple more days let that cure all the way turned out very nice very happy with it yes very happy indeed so that's the dry pour method a lot easier than trying to mix a whole bunch of bags and do it as quickly as I can because I had to do it by myself my health my wife helped me a little bit with the screening reading but um and I filmed that but something happened in the video it didn't work out so there we have it okay so we did the big reveal you see how it turned out now let me go back and tell you exactly how I poured and did the screening real quickly so the frame was obviously where you see the slab right now and I started in this corner here and I took 60 pound bags of of concrete mix I used say Creek that's all there's as I said before that's all there is available in my area but it worked out great and I I poured bags along this end here all the way across and I poured it higher than the frame and it's important that you go a little bit higher than the frame because then you're going to take a two by four this is six feet wide I took an eight foot two two by four and I started at this end and I started moving it back and forth like this while I was moving it forward as you're moving it Forward remember I poured it higher than the mold so it's pushing all that forward and it's dumping down into the frame as you're going just a little bit above what's half happening with the screeding is all the aggregate or the gravel is settling down below the surface and the cement powder is coming up to the surface just a little bit so you get a smoother top to it and you don't have a bunch of gravel and rocks and then you know as your board if you're as you're moving that board back and forth and moving it this way you will push those piles and and then you get to a point to where you need to grab some more bags and then pour it across like this and you just keep coming across and screening as you go going back when you see little pockets that aren't full grab a handful and dump it in there take the board back screed some more keep moving forward keep then pour another line all the way across screed screed screed and just keep on doing that all the way till you get to the end another Beauty about this that if I didn't mention is you don't have a bunch of unused wet concrete when you're done that you need to clean up and dispose of because you use exactly the amount that you need now when you look at this close-up you'll see I got a little bit of extra stuff around the edges that can easily be picked up like this stuff right here real easy to pick up and and I'll clean that up later so that's the screeding the point in the screening process again there are great videos online uh look for Cajun Country Living as a guy and his wife they do a lot of this a lot of dry pore projects and they're really thorough in how to do it so it's it's really cool okay so let's get on to the next part of the video where I test it out Okay so we've got my brand new driving range here with my freshly dry poured concrete slab made it a little bit bigger so I've got room for the bucket to sit on here nice and square and I have a place to set my golf bag so it doesn't fall over I was setting it on boards and just in the dirt and stuff and the wind would blow and it would fall over so I made this one a little bit bigger so I got a place for the bag so now here's where the rubber meets the road we're going to give it a try hitting it with an iron this mat that I've got here it's nice and strong nice and thick so you I won't really be feeling you know the concrete down below give it a nice little whirl here now that felt nice comes off there real nice so there you have it the dry pour method I recommend it for anybody that wants to try to pour their own little slab all by themselves is there's virtually zero cleanup you don't have a bunch of dirty buckets and dirty tools that you got to clean up everything is poured dry and then once you've got it set you just start to wet it no dirty tools nothing uh no dirty clothes you just get a little dust on you and that's it so there you have it dry pour method successful love it so if you're interested in getting a cage like I have there's a link down in my description and also a good link for or a link for this really good high quality mat heating mat that's in the description as well and I even got a link in there for these little rubber tees so anyways go out there and try it yourself you'll love it you'll love the results this is going to serve me for a very long time thanks for watching

Channel: Your Simple Golf Swing

Views: 2,996

Keywords: consistency in golf, distance for seniors, driver distance, easy golf swing, gain more distance, golf swing basics, golf swing for beginners, golf swing hip rotation drills, golf swing sequence, golf swing side arm throw, golf swing tempo drills, golf swing trail arm, golf swing tucking right elbow, mike austin, mike dunaway, simple golf swing, your simple golf swing

Id: J71xdHSzPUI

Length: 20min 43sec (1243 seconds)

Published: Sun May 07 2023