Chip seal driveway question

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Flyover

Trying not to screw things up worse
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My wife is interested in getting our concrete driveway resurfaced with chip seal. There's a company that's been out dropping flyers, so somebody around here evidently can do the job.

What I've read about chip seal is it has to go down over a driveway that's in decent shape and I don't know if mine counts. Our driveway isn't a crumbling mess or anything but it does have some big cracks:
20210813_195623.jpg

Also, both part of the driveway and part of the garage slab have sunken slightly and I was hoping at some point to do the concrete injection thing underneath to raise them back up so my garage door doesn't leave a gap when it's closed:

20210813_195634.jpg

Will chip seal make this repair harder/impossible later on?
 
That driveway was laid totally wrong, wrong substrate, wrong cut lines.
Anything you try to do without removing all of it and doing it over correctly will just be just polishing a tur*.
 
At an outward appearance, I would agree with Joe.

So this process; "With chip seals, a thin film of heated asphalt liquid is sprayed on the road surface, followed by the placement of small aggregates ("chips"). The chips are then rolled to orient the chips for maximum adherence to the asphalt, and excess stone is swept from the surface."

mite solve an "appearance" problem, but the base condition would still remain.

As for the garage door/slab intersection, there are adjustable door bottom/sleeves, that will address that.

Here is some more;
Each individual slab can move at the expansion joints, and if you have an unstable base, the condition can occur more often. A concrete pavement that moves will damage any asphalt overlay over time. If you are looking to add asphalt over concrete, you will need to make sure you have a stable concrete surface below, with no expannsion joint shifting, to make a proper base for overlay.
Concrete has expansion joints where asphalt does not. Over time, the expansion joints will shift the concrete surface and wherever your concrete has a crack, the asphalt will eventually crack there as well. The expansion joint in the concrete is a designed area to allow for a crack, and while there are special reinforcing fabric strips that can be applied prior to overlay, over time, there is a very good chance that the cracks will eventually crack in the same spot on the asphalt. This is not considered pavement failure, but it is just a result of ongoing heat and cold expanding and contracting. Regular maintenance of your asphalt driveway or parking lot, and crackfilling these reflective cracks to prevent water intrusion will leave you with pavement that will last a long time.
 
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That driveway was laid totally wrong, wrong substrate, wrong cut lines.
Anything you try to do without removing all of it and doing it over correctly will just be just polishing a tur*.
Can you elaborate more? How can you tell what the substrate is? Where should the cut lines be?

We inherited the driveway with the house. What specifically should be different when we redo it?
 
As for the garage door/slab intersection, there are adjustable door bottom/sleeves, that will address that.
I'm aware of these quick fixes, but inline with Joecaption's sentiments, I'm not interested in polishing turds; I'd rather have the door close fully because the slab is in position than because I've made the bottom of the door into a funny shape.
 
Just my opinion on your driveway. As it is it looks fully functional to me. It is not a thing of beauty but compared to my gravel driveway I would trade you.



If it were mine I would clean up the grass in the cracks pressure wash it good and fill the cracks with some sealer that matched the color close enough and just live with it.



Other people hate a crack in a driveway and are going for the look of a perfect slab. I see people bust out driveways like yours all the time and pour new ones at quite an expense.



What I would never do is tar and chips over a concrete driveway but I would over a cracked up asphalt drive. They even do it here as a way of sealing a new asphalt road. I think if you tar and chip it the cracks will return to the new surface and you will be messing with it forever.

It all boils down to how much the look bothers you and are you willing to spend a lot for a good look with replacing it all or the cheaper quick fix that might not last as long.
 
Thanks for those thoughts, @bud16415. That's similar to my own thinking.

When my wife said she wanted to do the chip seal, I thought what's the rush? Our driveway's basically fine. It is slightly uneven because of the cracks and this makes it a pain to shovel in the winter because you're pushing the shovel and all of a sudden the handle gets rammed into your chest, but otherwise it doesn't bother me.

My wife did some work attacking the grass growing out of the cracks when spring started, then she gave up because even she realized she didn't care. I think with the chip seal she just thought maybe this is a cheap way to not have to think about it again, but I insisted on doing research (like this) first.

I figured we could take that same money and do something higher priority with it, like leveling the slab under our garage. This thread has firmed up my thinking on that.
 
For sure if there is money for doing some repair things like a concrete driveway with cracks would take a back seat IMO to something structural that needs done. I do see lots of times though people work on cosmetic things first in a new home.



I have never had enough money to go after everything at once like you see on the home remodeling shows on TV. So I always had a pecking order and often I never got to the bottom of the list as new stuff filled the top.

Get a snowblower with little skis that will ride the cracks.
 
if there is money for doing some repair things like a concrete driveway with cracks would take a back seat IMO to something structural that needs done.
Yup, my thoughts exactly.
Get a snowblower with little skis that will ride the cracks.
This is where our thinking parts ways. One, I hate the idea of having to purchase, store, power, and maintain a snowblower. Two, shoveling snow by hand is good exercise and builds character (i.e. my kids can do it once they're big enough), plus if a snow shovel breaks I can easily repair or replace. I avoid powered-anything whenever I reasonably can. I can deal with the driveway cracks, that just builds character too even though it's a pain.
 
I agree and after 50 years of building character I found I was getting too much and switched to power. I built a good deal also with digging large holes by hand and even mowing grass as a kid with a reel mower.



Around 60 I found my 55 gallon drum of elbow grease was just about empty.



As long as you have kids I will tell you what my dad did for me in the snow removal process. He took a 4x8 sheet of something he had laying around and cut two hand slots along the 8’ side and one on each of the 4’ sides making a two man or one man one boy shovel that was 8’ wide. He called me out of the house and we had about 6” of snow on the concrete driveway that looked like yours and told me what we were going to do. We had that driveway cleaned in under 5 minutes. We came into the garage and he hung it on two nails on the wall to be used every time the snow wasn’t too deep or too heavy.



He passed away when I was 22 and it hung on the wall till the day my mother moved out around 80 and had an auction. It didn’t sell and the new owners likely wondered what it was for.

That thing was a character builder for sure. Make one for you and the kids when they are old enough. :coffee:
 
Around 60 I found my 55 gallon drum of elbow grease was just about empty
Yup, "check back in when I'm in my 60s" can be silently appended to much of what I say.

I get a weird mix of feelings, though, seeing people my age and younger always choosing to have machines do all the work for them at every opportunity.

Anyway thanks for the driveway advice. Based on that we've decided to skip the chip.
 
I agree and each generation is going in that direction. My parents grew up in the great depression and learned to be self sufficient and worked hard and their bodies showed it. My dad at 45 was as beat up as it took me to get to 65. But in some ways I think he crammed 65 years of living into 45 years.

We had a guy a lot younger than me at work and he asked if I would bring my truck and plow over in the spring to smooth a pile of dirt in his yard and he would pay me. I told him no it will leave ruts and snow plows are not made to move dirt and he kept asking and telling me the yard was firm and the dirt was lose until said I would. Saturday morning I get up attach the plow go over to his house and flipped my lid. This pile of dirt was about 2-3 wheelbarrows of top soil. I told him 10 minutes with a shovel and he would be done. He insisted again so I drove across his lawn back dragged the whole thing at once about 20’ and he said that’s great and paid me. I wasn’t going to charge him if it was a big pile like I was expecting.
 
I'm not an expert in anything, but this is what I've seen and what I think I understand.

I'm in California, and doing a chip seal over the asphalt streets in the less affluent parts of town is a common practice. As a street gets old and starts to deteriorate, fist they pour some kind of black goo over the cracks as they develop. Then, when that does't do anything (and it never does), they cover road after road with chip seal. As Snoonyb said the small aggregate is spread over heated asphalt liquid and then rolled. I've never seen the sweeping up process, but let me tell you, we have aggregate all over the place for months.

But the short of it is that it isn't long before the cracks that were there before and places there the original asphalt overlapped itself start to show up again.

Isn't the point of the hot asphalt liquid to bond with the asphalt that is already there? How can it bond with concrete? I would be really suspicious of guys going around passing out flyers wanting to fix up cracked concrete with chip seal.

If I misunderstood and they were offering to repair the cracks in asphalt driveways, then I apologize for maligning them.
 
@BantyMom We have a mix of concrete and asphalt driveways in our neighborhood. (And at least one or two beautiful paver driveways.) At least one other nearby neighborhood is all asphalt driveways.

So one possibility is that this company meant to target the asphalt-driveway houses, but for whatever reason flyers got passed out to everyone. It might have come in the mail. It's possible nobody even checked what kind of driveway we had first, they just calculated there was a certain number of asphalt driveways of a certain age in this area and sent the mailer to everyone, plus that casts a wide net anyway.
 
Chip seal is a cheap fix on rural roads. It would create a hot mess on your driveway. It would look OK for one season, but it would quickly mirror every crack in your existing driveway.
 
I have a 1,600-foot long by 10-12 feet wide driveway that is currently gravel AB (mag spec 3/4" minus rock with fine sands). It's a good road base but getting sick of the dust and rocks. Just wondering the costs to have a driveway my length, chip sealed? Since I already have the road base, just looking to have the tar poured and the chip seal laid and rolled.
I worked for an asphalt company doing this exact job. Hot asphalt is sprayed down and pea stone or chips put over it and rolled. It is a primary maintenance program in many New England town roads to this day. I even did my own driveway with it and it is still in place after 40+ years albeit with some cracks. It does NOT work well over concrete roads but with a good gravel base it is fine.
 
I worked for an asphalt company doing this exact job. Hot asphalt is sprayed down and pea stone or chips put over it and rolled. It is a primary maintenance program in many New England town roads to this day. I even did my own driveway with it and it is still in place after 40+ years albeit with some cracks. It does NOT work well over concrete roads but with a good gravel base it is fine.
Around here NE PA about 20 years ago maybe more Tar & Chips became the method of sealing asphalt roads. Our road at my old house had gotten in rough shape and the township came in and milled it and did a beautiful new smooth asphalt road. I used to love riding my bike on it and the kids were skateboarding down it. The next spring I heard they were planning to tar & chip over it and I ran into a supervisor and asked him if they were nuts messing with the beautiful road. He said he could explain about sealing and all that but he said he would ask one question and let me think about it and then complain if I wanted to.



He said have you noticed more kids on the road and have you noticed cars going faster? He was totally correct I went home and noticed where I once went 25MPH I was now going 40MPH. I sat out front a while and noticed most cars were more like 45-50 MPH. I called him up and said go ahead with the tar & chips.



I never saw it put over concrete also. I have seen a few people coat a concrete driveway with the black asphalt sealer. Not sure why, I guess they wanted it to look more like the neighbors black driveways.
 
I have a 1,600-foot long by 10-12 feet wide driveway that is currently gravel AB (mag spec 3/4" minus rock with fine sands). It's a good road base but getting sick of the dust and rocks. Just wondering the costs to have a driveway my length, chip sealed? Since I already have the road base, just looking to have the tar poured and the chip seal laid and rolled.
My drive is about 600'. I used 411 stone on it because it has fines and packed well. I always had pot holes, especially in the spring. It tracked stone slop into the garages and was always all over the cars. I debated several things and chip and seal was one but I never found anyone here that does it. The county and township do it but they do it themselves. I ened up putting down 54 stone. Its a lot better it doesn't have the fines and dust. It doesn't make the sloppy mess and I have a lot less pot hole issues. It is a little rougher and doesnt pack as hard so its tougher to plow snow. But it doesn't cost much.

Funny thing on the rough road comment. The guy that hauls my stone is a township trustee. When he brought me some stone they happened to be doing a chip and seal job on my road. It was getting pretty bad. He told be some neighbors had been complaining about the road condition. I told him I thought it was fine the way it was. I told him the rougher it is the slower they'll go. He got a good laugh out of that and said more people should think about that. He said he'd pass the comment along.
 

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