WHY Retaining wall Engineers ARE ALL WRONG!!

all right good morning everyone so back out on our site after a beautiful weekend um so it's kind of funny joey good lord that kid's a freaking tank so he shows you know shows up this morning obviously just sick as hell look man what'd you show up for right go home man i always show up just uh let's go go home dude go home you're sick so uh it's just gonna be me and blaine today hopefully joey's feeling better tomorrow um so i'm waiting for blaine to show up i am going to fire up the maniacs and just start keep backfilling here a little bit and then what is this going to build and backfill if anyone's looking for a recommendation on like on some pruners these would be the ones right here the falco's all these are the falco 2's the falco 3's are freaking sweet too they'll last forever they're a little bit more expensive but holy crap my dad gave me these when i was like nine um another thing to be aware of uh your packing if you're using one of these smaller plate packers this is a 250 pound plate packer and you'll see me and blaine doing them doing really short lifts about two and a half to three inches and that's because it'll only so say we did like a four inch lift it's not going to pack that whole four inches it'll just pack the top of it and it will reach a point where it won't pack anymore and it will be you know top couple inches that are packed and the bottom couple inches won't be packed so that's why we're doing it in shorter lifts takes a little bit longer but you're getting the actual complete compaction especially if you're using a 250 pound plate packer if you're using you know one of the big boys we could do a five six inch lifts but small packer small lips that's all you gotta remember so here's a fun one that even the engineers can't explain to me you're technically not supposed to compact within three feet of the back side of a retaining wall except your drainage zone is only supposed to be 12 inches behind the retaining wall so that means technically you're supposed to have two feet of uncontrolled fill going in behind your retaining wall no way if you don't pack that two foot that goes behind the drainage zone you're going to have problems and so we always compact it and when i've questioned the engineers they've never yet come up with a good solution and speaking of engineers if you are going to build an engineered retaining wall you can't just get any old civil engineer i'm going to recommend you get somebody that not only understands retaining wall construction but also has specialty programs designed to help you build that retaining wall meaning that there is cad aided designs that will allow you to allow an engineer to design the specific grid lengths for the retaining wall here's where it gets interesting even though you got a six foot let's say you got a six foot retaining wall not all of your grid lengths behind that retaining wall are going to be equal distance or equal length behind the retaining wall it'll depend on the surcharge and the surcharge means the load that is placed behind the retaining wall and typically the surcharge is going to come from two different forms or functions one is going to be a hill the other one is going to be a structure and then the grid lengths are dependent on the le the height of the retaining wall the type of soil that is going behind the retaining well that's a critical element to make sure you have a soil sample and then the surcharge that the retaining wall is going to experience all of these three things tie together to actually make a properly engineered retaining wall and that's why i back up to say you don't want just any old civil engineer you want to make sure you get somebody that understands retaining wall construction because you as the installer no matter what happens if you screw that wall up you're liable for it for eight years that's right if they find a fault in you don't even have to give a warranty if there's if it's legally you find a fault in your retaining wall because the installer pay that bill for eight years so you best do it right [Music] me [Music] youtube what you know about me [Music] all right we're going to be playing every landscaper's favorite sport today which is race terrain so we're just going to get as much stacked as we can and as much backfilled as we can uh before the rain ah they always get caught in the grid every grid layer they get caught in the grid i gotta cut one for this next course and then i think i got i got one more on top of that then one more on top of that and then caps now one of the things that always looks off that i need to explain to you is that grid that you just seen there that looked all higgledy-piggledy the walls here the grid is flopped down there's rock under here and what we learned when we were doing all commercial work was to speed up the building process what we don't do is lay one course of block down then backfill it lay one course a block down then where's the block going back that's just too tedious and time consuming to keep switching gears back and forth but we do do is i did say doo doo we put four courses of block up and the reason we put four courses of block up is because that is where your grid spacing is always in a retaining wall so that we always have a one layer of geo grid that we're backfilling either up to or over the top of and what we do with that geo grid is if we're back filling up to it is we flip it up over the face of the wall we get everything nice and level to where that grid start stops and we slap that down onto the dirt and then we can keep back filling up to the back of that top block but by being able to strategically and carefully put four courses up we also realized that we were able to speed up the building process which is not as critical in a residential retaining wall but it's hyper critical in a commercial retaining wall and so a lot of the tips and tricks and techniques that we use on that you see in these videos were actually pulled off from when we were building massive commercial sites and we had to keep up with the joneses basically to be able to land the bits all right um scuffing these blocks up very important part of a building wall stan can explain more about that it's just like they get i guess you could call it like overcast on the top where like the channels are and stuff and it's not very much but it's enough to throw your wall off especially say you're doing like an 11 foot wall and your base blocks didn't get scuffed off by the time you get to that point on top of your wall that's that's going to cause some big problems for you stan can explain more about that it's just a very important step i should just say [Music] so it's the story of the princess and the pea basically meaning that a little teeny tiny imperfection at the bottom of the retaining wall can turn into a really big deal when it gets to the top of the retaining wall so you've got to be very careful that at the lowest levels of the courses that all of the block tops match up perfectly and what it's called is slag or overcast during the process of manufacturing what happens is they get just a little teeny tiny little bit of extra concrete and if that isn't removed then that's going to become a major problem down the road but one of the things you got to be super careful of is when you're building an engineered retaining wall is the grid layers because even your grid layers on a tall enough wall can throw it off when you get up high enough but a lot of times what happens is you put a grid down on the top of a block and then you get a little rock trapped between the grid and the block and even that can make your block rock and or could throw off the top so you've got to be hyper critical of everything that happens at the lowest courses once you get up to the top of the courses you can actually be a little bit more forgiving i don't recommend it because then you get into a bad habit i remember i recommend remaining hyper critical throughout the entire process because that becomes just a habit that goes right from the bay the beginning of the retaining wall to the end of the retaining wall but let's play worst case scenario and you miss something and it's close to the top well there's only one course going on on top of the the the spot you missed you might not see it and if it's not structural well then it just becomes an issue of aesthetics but if you're hypercritical throughout the whole process you don't have nothing to worry about anyway so this one right here the face is fine the face is all good we got this big like air pocket or something like this and now if this was you know back here a little bit that'd be fine we'd use it we could put it in the front of the wall but with the step back on here the next block on top of it we'll be sitting right here and you will be able to see that plane's day in the wall so we're going to use that to cut because this is the side i need [Music] we got our cut get that up on there stack out another course and then we only got one more to go oh i keep forgetting what i've seen some of you guys asking about and it's about this mask it just has the replaceable filters in it it looks a whole lot cooler and uh i'd argue that the rule of cool is the most important rule of all um so this one is a is a base camp one but they have a whole bunch of different places that that are making these um you have to check though because some of them aren't like the same as the n95 so you'll you know you'll have to check in the specifications if you get one of these and stuff because you don't want to end up with just like a dust mask or something like that make sure you have one that that has like the rubberized nose piece on there because the one that um i was using last year didn't it was just metal and like that maybe lasted two or three weeks before it before it busted so make sure you got one of them rubberized ones if you guys pick one of these up [Music] so [Music] i got some tips for you when you're straightening by yourself or a trick i actually have a thing rigged up that like sits in here or whatever that you can loop it onto well i have i have two of them but i forgot to grab them of course but you can do it like this too if you got a block you know wrap your string line around there a couple of times and then grab yourself a pin because you don't want you know you don't want your string line sitting right on top of your blocks um so you get your pin and i like to loop it like one more time on there just to have a little bit more sturdy and you line it up on the back your blocks after you make sure whichever one after you make sure they're all pushed out um and then you can either do the same thing on the other side or you can just hold it like i was just holding it and do it like that and uh okay so obviously we got a radius going on right and how you straighten those because you know you can't pull string line like you can on the straight rung um is first of all you pound them all forward as far as they will go and then you just match up you match up the seams as long as they're all the way forward and the seams matched up that should look should look pretty good another thing when you're stacking your rows this is the time that you absolutely want to you know take a little bit of time make sure you don't have any gaps in the gaps in the course or anything like that and i i i really i see that all over the places the gaps in between the blocks on the courses and stuff like that and you know that would put me in the mindset if i was a homeowner just saving up for a wall all excited shelled out a whole bunch of money for it and i'm looking at it when it's done and there's gaps in between the blocks and all that kind of stuff that maybe starts getting me thinking what the hell else you know maybe didn't they take the time to do on my wall and stuff like that so it's just like those tiny little details and stuff like that that you might not think matters but will you know matter the homeowner and stuff and it's the same thing i see this all the time with like the grates and stuff there's a right way for these you know you got your you got your text right there there's a up and down on those things i mean technically not they'll work whatever way you put them in but again that's something that you know people are going to notice [Music] so one of the important things to do is to straighten each and every course because it's easier to a stitch in time saves nine it's easier to catch it right away before it becomes a problem and the way we do it on straight runs is we always string line the back side of the wall and the reason we straighten string line the back side of the walls because the face is a rough face and it's rough intentionally to give it that texture the back side is a machine face and it allows you to be more precise with your string line so that's one of the things that we do very consistently but i hope you guys enjoyed today's video but we're not quite done with this project yet so hit that subscribe button and come back tomorrow cause we're gonna wrap it all up that's all we got for you on this one god bless go get em we'll see on the next one