Pothole Patching

Before we could repaint the hangar floor, we needed to repair some small potholes located right about where the aircraft nose would be positioned in the hangar.  

To do the job, I picked up this premixed patching compound at Home Depot.  It's weird stuff, but it works pretty darn well.  Best way I can describe it is like pea-sized gravel mixed in a dry but very sticky slurry, hard to stick a trowel into, the whole mess black as pitch (a close relative).  One little bucket was more than we needed.  You wouldn't think it could fill a hole nicely, and it doesn't ... until you pound it REALLY hard.  I guess it's the same stuff you see the road crew steamrollering hundreds of yards at a time.  I'm starting to appreciate the need for the steamroller!

Well, we didn't have a steamroller, but we did have Don Varner, and an 8"x8" landscaping tamper.  BANG! BANG! BANG!  Being former rock-and-roll types, we had earplugs handy, but Don went and apologized to our next door neighbor, who turned out to have his hangar filled up with old cars and a WWII jeep.

Once you really compact this patching compound, it lightens in color and gets rock hard.  The technique we ended up with was to mound up a tarball of the compound sticking well above the hole, whack it a dozen times or so with the tamper, add more little dollops around the edges and anywhere it was still black, and whack it some more.

You can see the main hole and three little ones in this picture.  The little ones appear grey, signifying full compaction, and the big one is darker because we had just sprinkled water on it to accelerate the curing process.  You can also see where the tamper handle broke!  To get the edges fairly flush, we were striking with the tamper slightly out of vertical to get more impact on the corner of the tool.  Snap!

Fortunately, we were almost done at this point and were able to finish the job (shown in the first picture) with a rubber mallet striking a metal trowel held flat against the patch.  We would have had a clean edge on that one too, but the underlying asphalt was very poor quality locally and was starting to blow out around the edges.

According to the instructions, when you're done pounding the pothole patch, it will bear full weight (even before final cure).  Lucky thing, 'cause Don almost immediately drove a car over the main pothole, to unload some boxes into the corner of the hangar.

Total time was about two hours on Saturday afternoon (I'm posting this a day late).

Now we just need an airplane!