Site Prep & Compaction for Menards Foundation

[Music] all right guys so this is the Menard superstore and this is probably the first biggest job that we ever tackled and the contractor we worked for wasn't ready for us to come in with this little experience as we had so this entire thing I'm gonna blame right on myself I took on doing all of the excavation site prep and earth work for this job with a just a single excavator a skid steer and a dump truck that was way older than I am right now and one of the jobs we had to do and the way we well the way we did the job really torqued off the project supervisors out here we were actually bringing old farming techniques that I had learned growing up and road construction techniques that I had learned by jumping on the sill of dump truck doors and talking to inspectors while they were actually building in prepping roads and I thought well if it works there it'll work here but it wasn't the preconceived it didn't match the preconceived notions that the project supervisor on the site was expecting to see and rightfully so a good example would be the footings of this building all had to be compacted to a minimum of 97% standard Proctor density to hit that compaction level what I would do is I would use the same techniques that I seen them use on roads where we would use compression compaction and we would fill the footing up we would pack the lower levels but as we got to the top instead of using a regular standard compactor I would fill up my old 1976 white road boss dump truck filled to the brim I mean the truck would legally how about 50 50 3,000 pounds we had to have closer to 60 to 70 thousand pounds on it just mounded the dirt up and then I would go around every footing because at this building has columns throughout entire thing to hold the roof structure up not just the perimeter right and so I would fill that truck up and I would drive it around all of the footings the project supervisor came out that'll never work what do you think you're doing and I'm like I bet it'll work just give it a chance and he's like that's not how you put in a building this is not going to work it's going to feel nice as well it's got to be tested anyway we've got to have verification that we're hitting that 97% so just test it just check it out and do it well unfortunately what happened was I didn't hit 97% I hit a hundred and seven percent I went way over on my compaction and I say unfortunately because what I did by going way over was I entirely proved this project…