Thanks for the quick response.
Yes bedrock is right at the bottom of the dam, the owner was planning on replacing the wood in kind by lowering the water in the dam and excavating out the old cutoff wall. My current plan is to attemp to trench into the bedrock and place sheeting in that trench...
I'm working on a small dam rehab. It is a small (<10 ft high) earthen gravity dam that was originally built in the mid 1800s. It had a wooden cutoff wall to bedrock that has long since rotted out and been replaced numerous times. The owner wants to keep construction methods historical but I'm...
The other thing to realize is that most nukes test moisture on;y for the top 2" or so of material but the density is measured over thewhatever the depth of embendment is due to the placement of the sources. When working with "live" sands the top inch or so may dry and fluff very quickly, but...
I think that the public perception is that architects design buildings, as in the whole thing. As usual the engineers and the engineering is in the background. Check with your state though; when I was in school I worked for a company as a house designer, we did not claim to be architects nor...
While I have seen reports without lab testing as in when conditions are excellent or for projects with very little load, the concept of using re-molded samples to somehow correlate to in-situ N-values really scares the bejeesus out of me.
So quick and easy answer is, "No, these practices are...
While I was in school I worked at a Building Supply store, the contractors swore by a product called Thoroseal. It is a cement based coating made to seal concrete and is supposed to be vapor permeable. I don't know if it works to fill cracks but I seem to remember that there was a host of...
I agree with BigH's first post we need to know how the sand is poorly graded. Uniformly fine, medium, coarse or gap graded with gravels. Also you should make sure the ground water level is truly known, the SPT values can plunge at or near the water level.
In reference to the idea of keeping a...
Hey Pigdog,
I was recently on a job near Washington DC and we used a Pitcher sampler in very hard clays. I haven't seen the results of the tests yet, but the technique was solid. The only problem I saw with using it is that you would have to plan on it's use from the start of the boring...
The concrete basement floor in nearly all residential construction is a thin (4") slab that floats between the actual foundation walls. Therefore cracks in the floor are purely cosmetic, however they may be indicitive of the stresses also placed on the walls, if cracks begin to appear in...
