Today's project kicked my BUTT!!! LOL

I helped a good friend pour some concrete today. He and I are both the same age. He has a creek crossing that washed out the gravel this spring. When they put in the double culverts they had concreted the ends a little bit. That kept them from washing out completely but the middle and the down stream end had all the rock and concrete washed out. He was able to get the rock back out of the creek that had washed down stream. We let the gravel set a week to settle and dry out.

Yesterday morning we poured 4 yards of concrete on and around the ends to keep the water from going along the culverts and washing them out. We had to do this with real stiff concrete to get it to stand up on the slopes. I used my "fancy" concrete finishing tool on the ends. LOL a SCOOP shovel. Worked great to rough finish concrete. The back to smooth and the edge to move the concrete with. I did finish the surface with a hand trawl. Then after lunch we poured 9 yards of concrete on the road way. We used old cattle panels for reenforcement on the slopes and the flat part. We just leveled it off by eye and floated the finish a little bit. We wanted a rough finish and the surface to be not real even so that equipment tires can get better traction on it.

So one more job done by the "Hillbilly Construction Company" LOL

So the two of us poured and smoothed out 13 yards of concrete by ourselves. Lets just say I am sore tonight and bet that the morning is going to be real fun.

I dont think that will be washing out anytime soon.

I have to do the same thing at my place, except my culvert is a 6 foot tall by 9 foot wide oval.

Having the same washing out problem in all these heavy rains we seem to get once a year. Normal rains are fine. The 4-6 inchers in a couple of hours wreak havoc on it.

Rick

Old flat bed trailers make great creek crossings, I have seen single and double wide.

Hey, that should hold up well. Nice smooth edges shouldn't stop any trash. I like it.

No head walls required?

Vito

What are the diameter size on those pipes? One looks larger than the other.

My experience with "head walls" is that; if they aren"t anchored well below the creek bottom, they will eventually washout. Hope you have better luck. I would keep a supply of large rocks handy.

The pipes are both 2 foot in diameter. This stream has water in it year round just like you see running now. It is spring fed from above.

As for head walls I have found on farm crossing like this they just cause more problems than they solve. What you can't see is that there is steel pipes driven 6 feet down to the bed rock on each end. We drove them last week with my post driver.

The only time this crossing has any water over it is in big rains. Usually in a few hours it is back down. With the smooth ends most of the water goes right over the crossing. The junk usually washes across too.

The total cost for this crossing is not bad.

2-2 ft. culverts $650
4- loads of gravel $700
12- steel pipes $360
13- Yards of concrete $1250

So for just under $3000 we have a pretty good crossing that should last for years.

It looks good! How wide is the crossing?

The top is sixteen feet wide. We need to cross it with the combines and planters so we wanted it at least that wide.

YOur project looks good. The only thing I'd do is dig out the downstream side about 4-5 ft deep and dump a load of rip rap into the hole. The downstream side is always the one to wash out first.