I want to lay a garage base at the bottom of my garden, for my motorbikes. It is 25 metres from the road side so delivery of pre-mixed concrete will be a problem, or expensive, or both.
I can mix the concrete myself using a cheap to hire mixer but I need some advice on the amount to lay in one batch, to avoid cracks.
The slab will be 6m x 4m x .125m = 3 cubic metres.
The mixer spec says it can mix 85 litres in 6 minutes.
Assuming I'm just tipping the concrete straight into the ready prepared area, with a bit of tamping and smoothing, I can probably mix and tip about
12 loads = 1 cubic metre, in 70 minutes, with possibly 20 mins more for actually shovelling all the ingredients into the mixer.This means I can lay one third of the base in about 1.5 hours.
So, help needed here :- What is the best way to do this?
I'm assuming I can't just lay the whole base over a space of 1.5x3 hours =
4.5 hours as the concrete at one end will have started to go off before I've finished at the other end?Should I lay 2 slabs, 2 metres wide each, with a 2 metre gap between them? Then, I could wait a few days until they have both gone off then fill in the gap with another slab? Will this be prone to cracks between the 3 separate sections?
Any ideas anyone. All comments and advice greatfully received.....
Cheers James