The Brew Cabin

My local hire centre told me that I should use a rubber foot for final positioning of pavors but one of my neighbours who has laid several driveways said that I should screed the pavors with sand and use a steel foot for final positioning.

What method do the experts use?

You don't really need a rubber boot for the campactor plate, you will however need a pair of ear defenders!

Normally, we'd only use a rubber/neoprene sole plate on a vibrating compactor when consolidating clay pavers or certain types of exposed aggregate pavers. For everyday concrete blocks we'd not bother, and we'd never use one with tumbled pavers.

As for the preparation, again, no sole attachement is used when consolidating sub-base or bedding materials.

This is not the first time I've heard of Hire Centres "recommending" that DIYers use the rubber/neoprene sole (at an additional cost, naturally!) and I suspect that it's partly an attempt to improve turnover, but also to reduce the incidence of complaints from hirers who ahev gone a little bit OTT with the plate compactor and rattled the living daylights out of their pavers to the point where they've actually damaged the surface of the blocks.

When consolidating, the block reach a 'point of refusal', which is the point beyond which they simply will not consoilidate further. Once this point has been reached, there's no 'give' left in the laying course material, so the blocks have to absorb all of the impact from the plate compactor, and it's this that often damages the blocks. Repeatedly running the plate up and down, side-to-side, for hours on end does NO GOOD WHATSOEVER to either a sub-base or the block pavers. You're just wasting your time, your fuel, and seriously pissing-off the neighbours.

Using a partial pre-compaction method of laying, no more than 6 passes of the vibrating plate are likely to be needed by any block pavement. Up, down, left, right, diagonal L-R, diagonal R-L and that's it!

So: don't worry about the rubber/neoprene attachment. The odds are that you don't need it!

Thanks Steve and Tony, this has answered my question and given me an explanation too.

Look out neighbours!