Al Carrell: You know, when the contractor built your house he had his own idea where the sidewalks are supposed to go. Now, you'd probably would like to have a walk going someplace else. Well, let me tell you there is a new product that is going to let you have a do-it-yourself project that you're going to love. It's going to be easy. It's going to be economical. It's a lot of fun. It'll give you a great looking walk. Come on, let's take a look. What I'm talking about is a sort of jello mold for concrete. Randy, tell us about this product.
Randy Williams: What this is Al, is a Quikcrete Walk Maker. And basically it's a form that any do-it-yourselfer can use to make a sidewalk, a walkway or patio. All they want to do is mix up their concrete mix, lay the form on the ground and then pack the concrete mix in.
AC: Do you just get a regular concrete mix to use in this?
RW: Just a regular concrete mix can work fine. We recommend our fiber reinforced concrete mix. Because it is a sidewalk we want some high impact strength concrete mix.
AC: I'm going to go over and straighten up the ground a little bit, get it level, and I'll meet you by the wheelbarrow.
RW: Sounds good.
AC: Now fortunately, you don't have to make the ground perfectly level. The reason is because this mold is very forgiving and it's flexible and so when you put it in place and you pour the concrete in it's going to go down and make you have a level walk.
RW: The next thing we're going to do is mix up our concrete mix.
AC: And as I understand it the key to it is that you have every grain of cement, rock, gravel, whatever, covered with the gray mix and you've got it made.
RW: Absolutely.
AC: Well now, we could put a stain in here, but we decided that it's going to be better for this particular purpose to just have the natural gray. But this would be the stage where we put the color in, right?
RW: Right Al, this is where we'd add our color if we wanted that. Now, what we're going to do Al is fill our form with our concrete mix. This form is actually designed so it takes exactly one bag of concrete mix.
AC: How convenient.
RW: Makes it pretty easy for the home owner to figure out how much he needs. What we want to do is take the concrete mix and just pack it down into the cavities and then we'll smooth it off to the top of the form.
AC: And it looks like we have just about all the cavities filled up. One little place over here, which I'm sure you already have seen. And, when we get through we'll be able to lift this up, move it on.
RW: Right Al. One thing that's nice about the mold is once the concrete mix is set, it takes about two minutes till we're ready to lift the form up and continue on. You really only need one form.
AC: That's really great. I'm going to go start mixing up the next batch.
RW: Sounds good.
AC: To hurry the project along we used two molds. While one was drying we were filling the other one.
RW: Okay Al. I think we're ready for that next batch.
AC: All right. It's all mixed up and ready to go.
RW: One thing we did on this one Al is we turned our form, rotated it 25 degrees and that'll give us a variation in the pattern.
AC: And it fits right exactly together there.
RW: Sure does.
AC: These molds run anywhere from $8.00 to $26.00. Throw in the cost of concrete and you can build a walkway for about 50 cents a square foot. To give the stones a natural rounded look, we used a wet paintbrush to smooth the edges. And that's it. It was easy, it was fun, it was fast and it's economical.
Contacts:
Quickcrete: 800-282-5828
Episode 49 1997 - 98 Season
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