You apparently are buying your materials at the wrong places. If you are
buying from places such as Lowes and Home Depot for bagged sand and gravel
you are paying five to ten times the price of sand and gravel that you could
buy it for at a aggregates supply house. Last time I bought sand and gravel,
although it's been awhile, it was less than 10.00 a ton.
Dick

"reader" wrote in message
news:W155g.7582$t_2.1378@trnddc07...

"Proctologically Violated©®" wrote in message
...
Awl--

In my shop-floor pouring travails (at least preparing for them), I gained
some inneresting insights.

1. Harbor Freight, ito of info, is even more useless than HD, if you can
imagine that.
In their various cement mixers, it is not clear from the cu ft
declarations,
if the cu ft refer to the *mixable* cu ft or the drum cu ft.
Plus, the prices for the various "sizes" are all over the map--no
correlation between size and price. Supposedly $199 for a 3.5 cu ft unit,
altho it's not at all clear what that 3.5 cu ft refers to.

The Husky mixer at HD is clear: $299 for a 5.0 cu ft drum, which will
mix
2.5 cu ft.
An 80# bag of ready mix yields about 0.6 cu ft of concrete, so the HD
mixer
will take, at least on paper, about 4 bags--considerably more than the
vague
references on the HF site.

2. Next, I was shocked to discover the following.
That it winds up being more than 2x as expensive to mix yer own
cement/gravel/sand as it is to just mix typical ready mix! I calc'd
$6.66/cu ft using ready mix, vs. about $14+ mixing the ingredients
yerself.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! wow.....
You can approx'ly check the calcs: $10 for 94 lbs cement, which yields
4.5
cu ft concrete, and which requires 250-300# sand (at $4 for 60 lbs) plus
300
lbs of gravel (at $4/60 lbs). Some of the data posted conflicts, but
this
is more or less correct. HD prices.
Stunning.
Which means buying ready mix is a no brainer.

Just watch the 'minimums' for truck delivery. Also watch the 'time on
site',
as some concrete trucks like to add the overtime to your bill. Where a
truck
does NOT make sense is for post holes, small footings, basically the small
stuff.