Now that I have dug the trenches, there is a lot of loose dirt to clean out manually with a shovel, because its hard to get nice clean trenches with the backhoe – I am not a good enough operator !
I used an electric jack hammer to put a bevel on all the raft edges, as required by the engineers plans. This is hard work because the jack hammer is heavy, and you need to be a but controlled about it.
Then I had to rake flat the piles and compact them with a wackier. Luckily Di’s father has a wackier that I could borrow, so that saved me a days hire fees.
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Again I used the trailer ramps to bridge the trenches so I could use the tractor bucket to carry out loose dirt.
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Then I had to spread sand over the flats. The sand is used as an underlay for the vapour barrier plastic, so it does not get punctured. I used bricks sand rather than packing sand, because bricks sand holds its shape better so its less likely to call into the trenches along the edges.
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I used the wacker on the sand also. I ended up with about 100mm of compacted clay, and about 50mm of sand, which worked out about the right height above the ground.
The reinforcing was also delivered with the sand. 5 of the slab mesh sheets and 32 of the trench mesh sheets.
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Notes for next time:
Don’t be too aggressive on the bevelling of the rafts – you just end up spending more money on concrete!
Use the dumpy and pay attention to the packed soil level. If necessary, import soil from the bore pier drillings. Its been ground up so its easy to handle. Also use the dumpy and a straight edge on the sand. All this will save heaps on the concrete.