Fun With Cold Patch; The World's Most Elegant Steamroller

Well, I mean compared to handling hot asphalt, I guess this qualifies as fun.

I bought two bags of Cold Patch at Home Depot, and a 4.75 gallon container of Latex-ite's asphalt seal.  I also bought the specific tool for rolling the seal.

I started out applying one bag of the Cold Patch to a spot on the driveway that was damaged when the septic tank trunk came up the road--and it was heavy.  It was actually easier than I expected: I emptied the bag into the damaged section, used a trowel to even it out, and used the tamper to compact the Cold Patch.  I retrospect, I think I spent too much time using the tamper--beyond a couple of thumps per section, it was not improving the compaction at all.  Rolling over the same surface with the Jaguar (the world's most elegant steamroller) seemed to do way more good.  It is not as hard as the poured asphalt, of course, but it was pretty solid, and I expect that both normal evaporation and tomorrow's 90+ temperatures will accelerate the hardening quite a bit.  I still need another two to three bags to complete this repair.

The actual reason that I bought this stuff, however, was the telescope garage apron.  The Cold Patch again was easy to spread out, and again, I spent too much time with the tamper.  I'm not sure that anything but one thump per section really did any good.  Aggravating this was that the Cold Patch was sticking to the bottom of tamper better than it was to the poor quality reground asphalt that makes up the apron.  Again, rolling it with the Jaguar seems to have been far more effective in flattening and hardening the surface.

I think I am going to need about four to five more bags of Cold Patch to complete the base.  The good news is that this is mostly money (about $18 a bag); you cut open the bag, spread it out with a trowel, tamp it quickly, then get into an air conditioned car to roll it.

The last step would be pouring the asphalt seal.  I suspect that it will, once it hardens, add hardness to the underlying Cold Patch, as well as give a very pretty, almost like poured asphalt look to the surface.  I am expecting to have enough left over of the asphalt seal to continue onto the chip-seal surface poured last year.  The chip-seal surface, while not as hard as asphalt, is adequate, but unattractive.  The asphalt seal will likely cover over the gravel, producing something that looks like the asphalt.