"Havin Fun", How we did it.

Many of you will recall that early after our arrival here in Mexico, we had a tractor out to the property to cleanup the driveway after the summer rains. That helped the lower straight portion of the road but unfortunately it actually made the switch back corner worse. The driver had dumped several bucket loads of loose rock on the corner and tried to pack it down with the tractor tires. That lasted about two days. We struggled with it for about a week, then decided we needed a permanent fix. Concrete was the answer!

To get started, we had another tractor come out and this time we just scraped off all the loose rock from the corner and brought it down to the original solid roadbed. That was a step in the right direction as it now became quite passible again but we knew it would not stand up to the summer wet season.

After some consultation with Don on what materials we would need, off I went to Home Depot to buy some 4X8 sheets of OSB plywood and miscellaneous lumber necessary to construct concrete forms. That was an interesting experience in itself. 99% of the construction in this area of Mexico is masonry and lumber is only used to make furniture, cabinets , doors etc.  Dimensional lumber like 2X4's, 2X6 etc are very hard to find and when you do find them, they only have a very limited stock. For instance, looking for 2X4's at Home Depot, they only carry 8', 10' and 12' lengths. They were out of the 8' and 10' and had about 6,  12 footers of which only one was straight enough to buy. When the Mexicans do concrete work, they use prefabricated steel forms that are not available to us DIY'ers.

We started by outlining the inside and outside edges of the curve using several garden hoses connected together.


We tried to make it wide enough to be easily navigable by vehicles of different sizes but not so wide as to use more concrete than necessary.

With Don's table saw we ripped the OSB into strips 4 inches wide by 8 feet long. We then we screwed the strips together with a short overlap on each to make a long board that we could use to form the edge of the curve. Don had metal stakes that we drove into the ground along the curve and that we could attach the plywood to with screws.


Here is what it looked like after we were done.


We used a string stretched across the top of the forms to check for high spots.  We needed to make sure we had at least 4 inches of clearance all the way across.

We only bought enough wood to outline the section that we would be doing with the first pour of 6 cubic meters of concrete (about 8 cubic yards) with the intention of reusing the forms on the second section.

The next step was cutting and laying out the heavy wire mesh that was to be embedded in the concrete to tie it all together. The wire is a 6X6 inch mesh that comes in a 48 inch wide roll and 20 meters long (66 feet). Because we did not want the concrete truck to drive on it, we had to cut each piece to fit as we went around the corner, then remove it and set it off to the side to be put back in place behind the truck as he went down the hill discharging the concrete.

The last step of preparation was to prepare a 2X4" to go across the top end of the forms to be put in place after the truck had come up, turned around and passed back down. Also we needed 1x4" expansion joints periodically along the run so the concrete will not crack when it expands and contracts in the heat of the sun. Those had to be precut to length and set aside to be installed as we went.

The night before we were scheduled to pour the concrete, I watered down the surface to minimise the amount of water absorbed by the earth out of the concrete mix.

Barbara described the events of "Pour" day in the previous post.

That's all there was to it. On the morning after, Don and I removed the forms from around the concrete, pulled up the stakes, and laid out the next section. We will do it all over again on Friday.

Here are some photo's of the first section and also the forms installed for the next.