More D.I.Y. concrete

Joesf Heffner has been sending in pictures of the progress on his quite involved learner’s project in DIY concrete. Here’s the next installment. Hey, guess what? It’s not all a cakewalk. It looks like they had a little bit of trouble with some unruly cement, but all’s well that ends well.

Some of these pictures are out of order. Some of them can be enlarged.

Ramp is gone, rent is paid, new concrete is being poured today and again on friday? After that, we will only need to pour one more QP to have a functional back and forth ramp. If we get away with riding that for abit, then we will focus on finishing the bowl area. I also had an idea at one time to make a skate ‘path’ around the perimeter of the yard, with little skate obstacles here and there. like a qp or a bank with parking block or a small gap and rail. border the whole path with raised concrete planting beds for growing flowers or vegetables. That is my idea for when i get my own property, this little bowl I am currently building is really to learn how to work concrete and get the forms and shapes I want more than an attempt to create a long term skate structure.

We learned from our efforts today. Our QP didnt turn out as nice as we would have liked. First we learned that a thicker and therefore more rigid piece of wood is needed for your form. we had one side bulge a lot from the weight of the concrete. Next we figured out our metal lattice was more under the concrete than in the middle of it. this also contributed to a huge sag in the middle of the right side of the QP. The left side kept its shape much nicer, no bulging from form either. In the end we decided dumping more on the top of the right would only increase the bulge, so we will be patching up the big shark bite in the near future. We figure we need to better set our metal lattice work so that it will help to hold the concrete in place while it is setting. we were able to reduce teh size of the bulge and shape it some so that it wasnt as bad as it could have been. Also a key note, it is a lot harder to fix a mistake in concrete than wood, you can’t just take a break and start over once you have 1000lbs of wet concrete poured and trying to do its own thing.

We made progress. I have moved up to using 1/2′ re-bar and I didnt have the sag problem like we did on our 3ft QP. I learned that hand packing 18 bags of concrete is really hard on the body. I spent 10 hours mixing, packing, floating, and finishing all by myself. This Jersey barrier style QP has 3ft trannies going up to 2ft tall then there is 18 inches of solid vert on top of it. I was in the dark with a flashlight last night trying to get the finish done. I am going to try and frame out the pocket between the jersey barrier and the pump bump this weekend and get our first pocket poured. Oh yeah, If you ever think you might not have enough back fill, start emptying the garbage from your garage and from around the house. We have buried quite a bit of crap headed for the public landfill, under our concrete.