Compact the Soil Base and Add Class 5 Material

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