"Nightjar" wrote in message
...
On 30/06/2013 18:17, MrWeld wrote:
A relative has about 80m² of gravelled areas around their house. Over
the years, the gravel has become very muddy, and is now coverered with
weeds.

Is there a cost effective way of washing gravel? I've tried putting it
in a handheld steel sieve sloshing it around in wheelbarrow of water,
but that was very slow, and generated large quantities of muddy water.

I suppose I could just put a membrane on top of it, followed by more
gravel, but I'd like to re-use the existing stuff.


You don't need to wash it. Simply use a sieve with a mesh size slightly
smaller than the gravel and sieve the dirt out. It is time consuming and
you will end up with a surprisingly large pile of dirt, but it works.

somewhere like machine mart sold a rotary sieve thingy, something stupid
like 200 squids, and something that could possibly be knocked up fairly
easily.

It was a cylinder of mesh, i think it had a metal spider at one end, to
which it attached to the frame via a bearing, a motor to the side drove it
around like a cement mixer, cylinder on an incline... bung a shovel full of
mixed crap in the open end, it's rotated around and the muck drops thru the
mesh into a barrow below, and the good stuff falls out the back in a
separate heap.

Wonder if someone could make up a sieve barrel or a cement mixer, just pop
the cement mixing barrel off, pop the sieve cylinder on, away you go.