Anybody With Experience of Honeycomb Driveways?

[Jeff Gaines]

I had my driveway/parking area replaced about 5 years ago - old drive removed, membrane put down and scalpings laid and compressed. I didn't have washed stone laid at the time because I wanted to sort out a mowing edge first.

The driveway is now full of weeds and investigations by a builder who looked at replacing it again shows there is only a couple of inches of scalpings laid, looks like I was conned :-(

I am considering one of these honeycomb driveways with a soil in-fill and grass seed. At least I can mow it then and the weeds will get chopped off.

Does anybody have experience of this type of driveway? It gets light use, my car and occasional visitors. It would need to take a skip lorry and skip though, I have lived here 8 years and had 12 skips so far and that's unlikely to change in the future.

I will need to get it done, it's about 200 square metres and so will need the use of a digger rather than a pick and shovel.

Many thanks.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Mm. I have all sorts of driveways here..

Ultimately what is the problem? I had a place where people drive over my grass verge. I simply laid MOT in the mud pile, and let them. Under light use MOT will grass over well. Under heavy use it crushes down to a fine chalky dust track.

I've laid MOT into muddy sections of lawn, and made them dry. Again it grasses over.

Gravel is similar, in time it grasses over. But its dustless. But not so permeable ..once it fills with mud, it loses the drainage..

Guess what. lay a layer of tarmac over that to stop weeds,and you have a british standard road!

The tarmacs seals it.The gravel makes a wear surface and the chalk/limestome substsrate spreads the load and drains the upper layers and prevents road collapse.

scrapings are almost a waste of time, laid thin. You need at least 4-6" of substrate to work in wet clay.

Pick the technique you want for what you want. I don't think honeycomb is worth it unless you like the looks.

[Andy Champ]

MOT? (Obviously not MoT, but what is it?)

Andy

[PeterMcC]

Andy Champ wrote in

Roadstone to Ministry of Transport spec.

As at:

[The Natural Philosopher]

Sorry; thought everyine knew the term.

As above. essentially limestone 'gravel' that compresses down into a sort of chalk.

The absolute best material for making tracks across bogs.

[Rod]

Better than expanded polystyrene?

(Odd place to find the article.)

[Andy Champ]

Ah, thanks. Might go under my drive extension soon, which is why the interest.

Andy.

[Bruce]

It compresses down into a sort of *concrete*.

The grading of the sizes of the pieces of stone is such that the medium-sized pieces fit in the gaps between the larger pieces, and the smaller pieces (down to dust) fill in the gaps between the small and medium pieces.

The end result is a graded stone that has very few voids in it. It can be remarkably strong if compacted in place while around its optimum moisture content.

The concept of careful grading of stone sizes in order to obtain a strong mass of stone was developed by a fine Scottish engineer called John Loudon McAdam in the early 19th century. The graded material became known as "Macadam". The material was used unbound, however the advent of the motor vehicle almost a century later required an even stronger and more durable material.

For this, the stone macadam was bound together with tar, giving it excellent waterproofing properties and good resistance against the formation of ruts. This was tarmacadam, or 'tarmac' for short, which gave its name to the Tarmac company who specialised in road building.

Macadam can also be bound together with cement. The resulting material is called cement bound macadam (no surprise there!). It is little used nowadays but was quite a useful material when bitumen was expensive or difficult to obtain.