Retaining walls- what 99% of people don't know

welcome back you guys in today's video we're going to be teaching you how we build retaining walls now this is actually going to be a video lesson that i would use for my own guys coming into the business and so i'm going to be sharing a lot of inside tips and tricks and things and ways we do things specifically that will hopefully help some of you guys out so it's already thursday this week and the team hasn't been able to work on their project yet so they're going to be heading off to the site today to check and see if they can get past the wet area and into the dry zone and start building on the retaining wall let's see how this goes just slime nothing but slime luckily we had everything you know tarped off pretty well so where we're actually going to be working as good as in drying stuff but our access absolutely is not and first impression on these new uh base camp masks i got for blaine iron will holy crap they're so comfortable one of the critical elements to make sure that these blocks stay the way we put them is to tow them in and what we'll use is just some native soils in front and behind the wall and then gently compact them we'll either use a hand packer sometimes we'll just use our feet other times we'll use a 150 pound plate packer but we've got to lock those blocks in place and then set a second row of blocks and pin them down once that second row is set we can start to breathe a little easier around those blocks [Music] all right guys one of the things to take into consideration is how you actually perform the project so every location is going to be completely different but one of the things that you have to be aware of is where you start you may be working your way out of a corner like painting yourself into a room so to speak and so you've got to know that wherever you end the wall you have access to get your equipment your materials and do all of your finish grading and skadood out so on this project blaine is starting at the least accessible spot which is sandwiched between a building and a cliff to build his retaining wall and now that he's got that portion built up and he's away from the building in a cliff he's gonna skinny his excavator down the bank so that he can start to work sideways on it the easiest place that we found to work is facing a retaining wall the worst place that you can build a retaining wall is up behind and looking down so now what blaine wants to do is at least get sideways to the retaining wall to make his life a little bit easier he would have done this before but there was no reason to because he had a building and a cliff and no room to work you guys need to understand how ridiculously built this timberwall wall was apparently there was an initial timber wall here and then i think it was put in in the 80s the homeowner was saying and then there was another one put in that was redone in the 90s sometime i do believe the first one blew out this one blew out so we're actually finding spots of two timber walls in here it's goofy me [Music] so [Music] and now i'm putting a knee on this one and stuff this one's already locked in so that's good to go that's just that one that we're locking in right now so don't worry don't worry i ain't stepping on loose base blocks now one of the advantages we have using the versa lock standard units is the ability to make any block that we need out in the field with nothing more than a hammer and a chisel now we also have a block splitter and we can saw cut any of these blocks but we can make half units corner units we can make seat walls we can make columns we can out of this one block create any block we need to do custom fabrication and this saves us from having to order these specialty blocks two things happen when you order one you've got to get your block count right which is no big deal but number two those specialty blocks aren't necessarily manufactured in the same plant using the same aggregate as the rest of the blocks in your retaining wall and sometimes when those specialty blocks show up they can be a slightly different color which is very noticeable and that leaves us with a nice rough finish on both ends for our corner units [Music] now here's a step that's easily overlooked and that's cleaning the top of the block in between courses and this is a very critical element because it's easy to get a small rock and a small rock in between the blocks you may not think of it as much but it can throw the level of the next course off and all of the subsequent courses afterwards and it's very easy to get rock in on a geogrid layer because that geo grid when we lay that down can actually trap the rocks in between the fabric in between the blocks and you'll see zach very carefully and meticulously sweeping off those blocks because we're adding geogrid later now on this job site we were asked to extend a downspout through the retaining wall and this will not ever get connected into the drain tile system of the retaining wall this will simply be extended down and through the retaining wall it will never mix with the retaining wall i want to be very clear on that point the downspout does not go into the same drain tile as the retaining wall this downspout gets its own solid pipe it runs through the face of the retaining wall out and away it will not be dumped into the drainage zone of the retaining wall [Applause] [Music] i think we should really talk a little bit more about compaction and different methods to make sure that you're making you're reaching compaction because this is one of those big issues that people have down the road where their walls are settling out now you'll see us using a 150 pound plate packer but you'll also see the fact that we're only putting in a couple inches of material at a time we wanted to go with the thicker lift eight inches to 12 inches we'd have to go with our thousand pound plate packer and with this soil it's difficult to work with so we're sacrificing by putting more lifts in using a smaller packer but it gives us more control we don't care how the soil gets compacted we just need to make sure that a hundred percent of it gets compacted and we don't leave any voids or spaces by going with thin lifts we can get that compaction by going with a smaller packer we also have better control when our soils aren't completely agreeing with us [Music] now's the time for you guys to ask your retaining wall questions because in this series i'm actually trying to answer your questions in the next video someone asked about the differences between a solid block and hollow blocks and we have a segment about that coming up another person had asked about more information on basing and so we've got some of that covered in the next video coming down the pipeline but is there anything specifically you guys would like to see in the video and i'll hopefully try to get something filmed and answer that for you so make sure you put your questions down below and i hope you guys enjoy this and i hope you stick around because the next one we go on to some of those topics that you really want to find out more about god bless you guys go get them and we'll hopefully see you on that video