Background…

The case was a couple of years ago. Carried out patching repairs on our street. At the very least, the road was patched up. Not an autobahn, of course, but compared to what it was ... In general, we are happy about that.

One evening, I look - my neighbor is pulling old asphalt in a wheelbarrow to his home, which the road workers threw at the curb during repairs.

I ask:

- Sergeyich, why the hell do you need this garbage?

And he grins:

— I will asphalt the yard.

I thought he was joking. But it turned out really ... I asked the road builders about their plans for heaps of old asphalt, which were formed as a result of removing part of the road surface. They replied that they would not let it in for recycling, and the heaps would simply be taken to the city dump.

When the road workers had a lunch break, he invited them to his yard. And there a clearing was already covered: a hefty pan of fried potatoes with mushrooms, a salad of fresh vegetables, all sorts of pickles and ... of course, vodka. After such a treat, the road workers promised that they would not take away the old asphalt, but Sergeyich must remove it from sight until the morning, because. in the morning their work will be checked by representatives from the mayor's office.

A couple of days later, Sergeyich called me to demonstrate his home mini asphalt processing plant.

He bungled this design to warm up the old asphalt:

The 200 liter drum is mounted on two welded supports made of 2 inch pipes. Old asphalt with the help of a sledgehammer and a crowbar crushes as finely as possible, falls asleep in a barrel. Filling - somewhere in half. This volume adds 3 kg of bitumen.

Lights a fire under the barrel. The whole mixture is heated, stirring regularly for half an hour. When all the bitumen warmed up and the mixture became similar to the asphalt that the road builders lay, Sergeyich added a bucket of crushed stone and half a bucket of sand. When the mixture became crumbly, he said, "Done."

I rolled a homemade wheelbarrow to the barrel. I helped him tilt the barrel to pour the mixture into the delivery vehicle.

The finished asphalt was laid on a previously prepared surface - a compacted cushion of crushed stone.

I will not tell you how to lay asphalt - this is a separate issue. But I will tell you about the devices that Sergeyich prepared for this work.

On a metal platform I bought 70 cm of a used ear tube with a diameter of 400 mm. I bungled from it such a homemade ice rink:

The internal space, to increase the mass, was filled with crushed stone. So that when rolling the asphalt, nothing sticks to the rink, he lubricated it with used oil from time to time.

In places where it was impossible to crawl with a skating rink, Sergeyich rammed the asphalt with such a pusher:

In all this technology, the most time is spent on heating the asphalt mixture. For one run, only 100 liters were heated. If you put a large volume in a barrel, it will be impossible to mix.

Nevertheless… If three of us work together, everything happens more or less quickly: one prepares the mixture, the other lays the asphalt, and the third one is in the wings of the previous two (hold, bring, trim ...)