Retaining walls- SPOTTING short cuts & BAD work

we're gonna get a lot done today [Music] and push to start timber retaining walls have a danger that maybe not everybody's aware of but those long timbers will oftentimes have spikes sticking out of one end or both ends and a lot of times when you go to throw the timber when one end hits the other end bounces up and can hit somebody that's not aware just be careful about them flying when we're building a new retaining wall we never leave anything buried below the base we don't want to put the base over old timbers we don't want to put it over old piping we don't want to put it over tree roots we don't want to put the base material over anything but pure virgin or solid compacted soil it doesn't matter and when i say pure virgin or solid compacted those aren't the same things we've got to be careful that if we're excavating we're going down to virgin soil or unexcavated material and then compacting it but if we've gone too deep in this case and we've got to bring the base back up you'll see us right there compacting that base material and a lot of times we'll just use rock but we can also use class 5 to bring that base up now in this case the customer did happen to have some class 5 that they were hoping to eliminate from their site and it was a perfect material to use as base material to bridge that area back up but you can see we also compacted the heck out of it before we went any further now this is an extra deep and wide base and there's nothing wrong with going deeper and wider on your base as long as you're properly compacting it and bringing it back the right way in fact the more base material have probably the better your wall will perform but that doesn't mean your wall will perform better just by having it you've got to do the right things with it now in this case if we happen to have really bad soils below this retaining wall and we could not perform a soil correction there's a neat trick we could do and that's to deepen the base to create a pyramid and to layer geo grid into the base materials and that is a topic for i think another video entirely all together it's an extremely advanced topic and it's not something that can be applied to every site but once you know how to use it you can start to spot areas and indicators where it's a perfect way to fix a problem area now in this case we just had extra timbers buried and we needed to bring it up so no geogrid was needed to layer into that base material [Music] now one thing we're doing on this job site is building the wall in sections and in this case it's simply because the job site is just too tight to allow us to be able to build the entire wall from the bottom all the way up as one unit so what we're doing is building one section from the bottom up at a time and then we're combining the sections together now you've got to be careful one of the things that can happen if you're not used to working this way is your wall can look like it was built in sections instead of looking like it's all one fluid unit if you spot and look closely you may see a retaining wall that was built in one section then another section then another section and another section and that's exactly what you don't want to see but if you're aware that that can happen as you're combining the sections together you just visually make sure that those different areas marry completely together and disappear and become one unit so right here zach and blaine are towing the wall in blaine carefully throws down a little bit of soil and then zach uses his feet and places that soil with a shovel and a rake and walks behind and in front of the block compacting it it doesn't take a whole lot of compaction but this is part of the process to lock that base course in and once we have the second course in place then we can start to actually step and walk on the wall but right now we gotta be careful not to touch it the next section i want to cover is basing the retaining wall and i think this is probably one of the most critical elements of building the retaining wall now you've got to get all of the right materials you've got to use those materials the right way but if you don't have someone that knows how to base it doesn't matter how good your materials are your retaining wall still not going to look good inside of our company we always have what we call a master baser and i said master baser and that's blaine blaine is the master baser tim and i are also the other two master basers and what we do is we go in and we oversee and we train the other guys on how to base we've just trained in alex on how to base and supervised him on a few of his projects until we're comfortable knowing that he can take over this critical step and sam is coming up very quickly being able to base now as sam is basing he's got to make sure that each block is level front to back side to side and then he's got to also marry that to the block in front of it and then that has to get married to the block behind it so all of the blocks have to sync up they can't be unlevel in any way shape or form not individually and not together as a team that's how you really get a wall that looks good [Music] so not everybody's gonna have these versa lock standard units available and that's okay if you understand how to pick the right block what you may have available in your area may be a hollow block and it's not the end of the world if this is what you're going to be working with but one of the things to be aware of is these hollow blocks require you to core fill them all the way up so as you lay these side by each now these aren't retaining wall blocks but they're very similar in design to a retaining wall block as you lay these blocks aside by each you're required to use three quarter inch angular rock now this is less than three quarter inch and you're supposed to core fill them all the way up and when you do that what happens is it locks these blocks together but a lot of times what installers will do is they'll build then backfill and they don't just build one layer they'll build two or three layers so if they take another block and they put it right over here now when they go to chlorophyll they're depending on this angular rock trickling its way down and through the wall and 100 filling it up and more times than not i've seen that become a problem but if you are going to go with a more hollow block i prefer having something that's hollow all the way through so that you can core fill [Music] all right we got to get this downspout hooked back up here so we're going to be getting some rain in about 30 minutes and if you guys will remember we put this drain box in and how he had it before uh it's not sitting over there anymore but it was running down into a chunk of pvc and running out that way so we got to cut three and a half inches off of here to get it to be setting right on top of the drain box there in the last video we talked about running a downspout through the face of the retaining wall but we made sure that we told you not to connect it into the drainage zone but here's another element about downspouts whenever you hook them to an underground piping you've got to have a break you can't solid pipe a downspout into a pipe because what will happen is it will freeze and it will back up and freeze all the way up the house and it'll pull the downspout right off from the house but by having just a little area of separation from the downspout to the underground drainage pipe you can keep that from [Music] happening as we get closer to the top we do not continue to backfill all the way up to the back of the top block with drainage aggregate in fact we switch over to using native soils that way the retaining wall flows more seamlessly into the rest of the landscaping if they want to have grass all the way up to the top of the wall they can or whatever else they choose all right guys we are all done for the day getting off a little early because we use up all of the blocks getting some more delivered on monday we got a whole lot done though this is top of wall right here minus the cap so it'll be up a little more and this course is gonna run pretty much to the corner and we're gonna step it down real fast over there all right rain's starting to pick up [Applause] now when we leave a site for rain we'll do a number of different things but one of the most important things you'll see that we have everything smooth graded as much as possible i can't say everything but we'll go through and our backfill piles will get smooth graded our work zone will get smooth graded we don't leave anything rough because that smooth grade really helps dry up the site faster and of course the critical areas that we can't smooth grade like the trenches well we cover up it's turpenner up right when the rain starts can't beat that time