| Once the chip-stone has settled in around the pavers, they're locked in quite tightly. The next challenge to consider is how to extract any of them afterward, in the rare cases where something needs to be fixed or re-leveled. The foreman fellow had said that it wasn't easy, but it seems to be a relatively simple issue of access and a little physics. The surrounding gaps would need to be sufficiently emptied of chipstone to allow raising any given piece out of the assembly, and here's one technique to accomplish that. |
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A generic wet/dry shop-vac gets the "crevice" attachment added, and is positioned over a paver gap in a way that any loose stone would be sucked up and delivered to the vacuum tank. Then a thin metal tool [here a piece of classic steel street-sweeper bristle, the stuff that the MIT kids like to make their lockpicks out of] can be used to tease the stone down lower in the gap up toward the vacuum. It turns out to be quite easy to empty a given slot of chip-stone fairly quickly. |
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In this test case the extraction target was a small sliver of paver-stone that had been installed slightly crooked, probably just due to the way the alignment nubs had meshed during compaction. With most of the chipstone gone, especially over the nubs, the piece could wiggle and begin its careful journey upward. The key thing is to work back and forth gently, and not chip the edges of the paver piece while prying upward. Stone will fall in underneath to help the process. For this sliver it was easiest to just grab it with pliers to finish the lift. |
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The remaining chip-stone can then be vacuumed out, but we must be careful to not pull up the larger bedding stuff below that. The size of the vacuum nozzle controls that to some extent. There hadn't been any rain for a couple of days, but here it's obvious that the concrete and stone is still damp underneath. It probably spends most of its life that way. |
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Next it was trivial to drop the piece back in, check overall alignment, and sweep some stone back in around it. |
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Done! This one little piece near the stoop had been aesthetically bugging me since the installation, and I managed to fix it. |