Turning a STEEP Hill into a Flat yard #1

We build an 11 foot TALL retaining wall to flatten out a steep sketchy slope.

All right you guys we’re gonna have a busy two weeks because we are going to take this project from start to finish this is an 11 foot tall retaining wall on a steep slope we’re gonna wrap this job up this week and then next week we’re going to dive into a patio that

We’re putting on top of this retaining wall and we’re going to show you that series back to back to back so you’ll be able to watch this job go from where it’s at to final completion without interruption Yes the grades changing a little bit here it’s kind of starting to come downhill this way and then this wall’s too close we’re shooting for a three to one in front of the wall um so bear in the second block and i don’t want to trust anything that this is doing

Um so we’re gonna cut this out of here it worked over there but it’s not working over here for for me essentially we’re banking on this couple timbers holding the base blocks not gonna fly for a massive nine foot wall that’s gonna be holding back an entire yard but once we get these

Timbers out of here then we can kind of see if we want to do a step down in this area or if we can get our get our three to one slope but these timbers need to be gone regardless all right i got the

I got the saws all up there for you bud all right let’s pop all right so let’s talk about what we’re doing at the base of retaining wall when we have a really steep slope and we’re going to be building a retaining wall on that steep

Slope we’ve got to embed more of the retaining wall meaning we’ve got to get more of the blocks buried so in this case tim wanted those timbers removed so that he could actually bury more of the base block [Applause] uh he got it right at the scene so actually yeah yeah here look out of the way he’s gonna pull this top one off for you if he left those in place and those fell away we may have one or two courses of block that should be buried exposed the wall

Wouldn’t fail by any means he’s just going above and above over and above can you pry it with a shovel from this end and tip it up top boards get her on the joint there Oh he’s he’s got some monster he put some monster leg bolts in here yeah so you don’t even need to get through all the way on that bottom one if you just get through most of the way he can he can snap it hey and today’s video is brought to you

By our friends from lmn software these guys help me be able to free up my time to make videos that help you guys out What tim is doing right here is he’s actually base basing a step up and so the base is step up this is where instead of stepping the slope down we’re stepping it up we actually put one block on top of another block so we have two

Blocks equal to each other and what that does is that allows us to keep all of our courses aligned Now when you’re building an engineered retaining wall one of the most critical things that you’ve got at dale is the geo grid and the geogrid if you look right here is that black mesh like fabric that lays horizontally behind the retaining wall that geo grid locks into the face of the

Retaining wall and what it does is it holds the face of the retaining wall to with all of the soil behind it so that everything then moves as one mass so if you look a little further down the wall right here you can see that on this slope we’re burying three courses

Two courses are getting buried right here but further down the line you can see where an actual third course was buried So if you look you’ll see us dry stacking the wall and we can actually dry stack the wall about four courses before we’re forced to backfill it and what we do is we can flip we put the grid down and then we stack stack stack and then we flip the grid up

We pack pack pack put the grid down at the appropriate level then continue to pack until we get to our four courses before we wash rinse and repeat that same process over again that’s a little trick we use to speed up the process so here’s kind of a fun fact you’ll see

That we’re installing drain tile into the retaining wall but if you ever drive by a retaining wall and you see the drain tile actually operating it means that that wall is in a state of failure they see on modular retaining walls like this they are a mortar-less system

Intentionally and we use a lot of drainage aggregate and you’re going to see that in just a moment but the entire retaining wall is designed to allow water to flow freely right through the face of it so if you ever actually see the water being funneled or jetted out

Through the drain tile at the bottom it means whatever company installed that retaining wall didn’t put enough drainage aggregate in or that drainage aggregate that may be in place is boogered up and not operating so either way if you’ve seen drayton operating in a modular retaining wall

Something is wrong that’s a big red flag So on this project we ended up bringing in about 45 dump truck loads of structural fill soil and instead of showing you each and every load going in we just thought we’d show you what it looked like so you could get a gist of what we’re using and that is

A granular material with the clay binder in it which allows us to pack it up tight like concrete [Applause] Yeah so now now he’s got to get in there and mix it all together so that we can get it to pack Foreign not back up into there so more than one of you guys have asked me stan what do you think of the asv versus the cat versus the kubota and here’s the breakdown we love the cab on the kubota hands down love that swing up door but the cat has buttery smooth controls

But the asv when it comes to just sketchy slopes that’s the machine that the guys go to so that right there is a really sketchy move there’s zero tolerance when a skid loader is gonna fall over it’ll tip over sideways but it’ll also likely tip forward and as he’s coming down the

Slope especially with weight in the bucket all of the weight of that machine is now transferring forward and when you’re driving down to a retaining wall if that machine decides to go forward typically you can just catch yourself with your bucket but when you have a retaining wall and you’re coming right

Up to the edge of it a lot of times if your machine falls forward the bucket will fall over the face of the retaining wall putting the operator in a really jeopardizing situation so although it doesn’t look like much on film a good operator knows that that right there is

A sketchy place to be and these guys have learned to trust on that asv they’ve gotten that machine dialed in and they know exactly where its capabilities are so when it comes to sketchy slopes that’s why these guys migrate to this machine we’re going to use up probably all this

Dirt today huh yeah that’s that’s good save something for this over the weekend we got to be able to backfill this all up and protect it if i get something in yep something’s got to get in though where did that come from So what they’re doing right here is prepping a geogrid zone and prepping a geogrid zone means they’re going to flatten it out so that they can pack it so that they can fold the geo grid down and then put more dirt over the top of it We go with very thin lifts because this allows us to see what material is actually going in place big rocks aren’t allowed things like whatever that was we found earlier is not allowed roots get pulled out anything that doesn’t look structural gets yanked and then as we get real close to the

Wall we use two different compactors in the drainage zone you’ll see that we’re using the 150 pound plate packer because it’s not going to shift the wall low and then in the reinforcement zone we switch over and we use our big pack So here he’s packing the reinforcement zone with our bigger packer you’ll also notice that we typically use the same block on every one of our products and that’s the versa lock standard and the reason we use that is simply put it is the only solid block on the market that is also pinned

And that gives us just the confidence knowing that we’re getting a good solid connection from one block to the next now you’ll have options with blocks and i want you guys just to kind of put your just to put it on your radar screen to know how blocks actually physically

Connect together a lot of blocks don’t have pins and what happens is they rely on gravity and weight to stick together and sometimes they’ll have a little tiny lip that runs along the back side of those blocks you can go to any one of the big box stores and flip a block up

And you’ll see that little lip and what that lip does is that lip provides uh this the connection so that the block can’t slide up and over so there’ll be a if this is the the block and then there’s a block underneath that this block will slide hit this block that lip

Will stop it but what happens if that lip comes off there’s nothing so now these two blocks just are having a slip and slide over the top of each other and those lips do come off those lips come off with just nothing much heavier than something like this we call it a

Chipping hammer so when we want to knock that lip off intentionally when we got to use those blocks for base we take a little chip and hammer and we just go tap tap tap tap tap tap along the back of the block and the lip shatters right off and now

We’ve got a flat block on the bottom that we can base with and it was when i came to the realization one day as i was tapping that back of that block off to base with them that this might not be the best connection method when i’m

Starting to build walls that are 9 11 15 25 feet tall and that’s when i started to i first used the versa lock standard units and i’ve been sold ever since i it is in my book they have not improved upon the design and i’ve been using these

Same blocks for 20 some years but we’ve got a lot more video coming down the pipeline we’re going to be tackling a very tricky corner coming up and we’re going to wrap this entire project out and this project actually grows from 9 feet to 11 feet

And then we’re going to be adding a patio on top of it so we’re also going to have a surcharge placed on top of this retaining wall and this entire wall is actually been designed to actually take if we wanted to add on to the wall

We could and if we want to place a surcharge on it we could we actually designed it ahead of time just in case those two things came up and on this job site actually both of those things came up they weren’t in the initial contract but by the time we

Finished up this portion of the project they became part of our initial but they became an add-on to our contract and you’re going to see this we’re going to finish this entire job out there’s not going to be any disruptions you guys it’s going to be one after another after another after

Another coming right down the pipeline so that you guys can see this job in its entirety and the only reason you’re not seeing it back when we started this project about a month ago is because we had a lot of change orders we had a lot of add-ons

And we weren’t able to wrap this job up in a timely fashion to make these videos come out in that order so we put that the videos on pause so that we could bring deliver them all to you one after another so get ready for that you guys

It’s coming down the pipeline hit that thumbs up button god bless you guys and go get em we’ll see on the next one and the next one and the next one and the next one i think there’s gonna be six six in total see on there