Are you ready for some hard physical work? It is suppose to reach 100 F today. The sun hasn't shown its face yet and it is already in the 80's and I want to mix and pour ten feet of sidewalk this morning. You may think that is not very much. If it were thirty degrees cooler I would agree. In the following picture I plan to do the first two sections. That will require ten eighty pound bags of dry ready mix. I use MAXIMIZER because it makes very durable sidewalks. Its high cement content provides a good durable surface, but the downside is, it comes with a higher price tag.
If I had a good helper on the mixer I would do all four sections, but alone and in this heat I can't mix, pour, and finish the surface in an efficient manner. Let us do two sections today - Friday - and come back tomorrow and do two more, but don't forget, we start at 6 AM when it is a little cooler. What, you sleep in on Saturday?
Consider the above picture. There are ten bags in the pile, but you can see only nine. Each one weights 80 pounds for a total of 800 pounds. I go to Home Depot and get six bags at a time. I lift them onto a flat cart and push them to checkout, then push them to my car and lift them into the back end of my car - seen in the picture - lift them out and stack them on the garage floor. Later I lift them up and put them in the wheelbarrow and wheel them to the mixing sight, lift them out of the wheelbarrow and stack them. Finally I lift them up to shoulder height and dump a bag at a time into the mixer. Consider the wonderful exercise I get and the calories I burn. It will take about fifty bags for this project. If my math is correct that is 4000 pounds or two ton.
I drag the mixer from the garage, unroll the electrical line and the hose and now the mixer is ready to do its part. The wheelbarrow is already there from bringing out the mix. But we still need more tools as the next picture shows.
The hammer, pry bar, pliers, pencil, and nails are used in other steps. The long handle scraper is used to move the ready mix around and tap it in around the forms after I dump two bags of mix at a time. A 2 x 4, not shown, is used to level the mix. The steel trowel, shown between the scraper and the hammer, is used to work the small stones down and the sand and cement mix to the surface. The trowel will be used several times to work the surface to a proper flat, smooth finish. I use the magnesium float on my last step in place of a broom to create the final finish. I don't like broom marks, but prefer the extra work of establishing a swirl when the surface is at the proper dryness. The two smaller tools are used to edge the sidewalk and form the joint markers at every five feet. If you don't do all these steps at the right time you won't end up with a nice job.
I am tired from just writing about this and since I am out of space we will write about the mixing in the next entry. See you then.
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