Since I'm working by myself, I'm concreting the shed floor in six 10'x10' squares. This is about as much as I like to do in a day, since I represent the total mixing, wheeling, placing and smoothing workforce. ;-)
Here's the mixer setup.
I use the old wire bed base on the left to sieve the lumps and bumps out of the sand for the top coat. The cement bags are emptied into the wheelbarrow tray that's sitting on the ground, for ease of shovelling. The blue drum holds water, and that's the gravel pile behind it. The bed base is resting on the sand pile. The yellow hose leads to the main water tank.
That's where I like to keep the generator - as far as possible from where I'm working! ;-) The yellow tank on the trailer holds about 500 litres of water (I only fill it about 1/3 full, since that's all the trailer springs and axle will cope with).
I fill the formwork up to about 1/2" from the top with a 2:4:1 gravel:sand:cement mixture. This is puddled with a rake to give a good surface for the top coat to key into.
Another view showing the gap at the top of the formwork.
The topcoat is a 2:1 sand:cement mortar. This is spread while the base coat is still wet, so that the two layers will fuse together properly. I was initially doing a 2' wide strip of base and then immediately laying the topcoat on it, but I've found that I get a much better finish by laying down all of the base layer and then applying the topcoat in a continuous process (the earlier section of top coat was getting too dry, and cracks appeared between the sections).
Well, that's halfway. Hoepfully I'll be finished by next Monday!
BTH
