Guide To Make White Concrete At Home Experimental

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White Concrete is white in colour other than basic concrete which is made up of three simple ingredients sand,cement and an aggregate like stones or gravel. Whenever you buy a bag of concrete mix like quikrete that’s what’s in there they’ve just got a very specific ratio of each of those ingredients but there’s no ready-made white concrete mix in my area and it’s expensive to get it shipped online.What I did find out is you can get white versions of each individual ingredient which should combine to make a good white concrete mix. let’s do some tests and find out on webofconcrete.com

white concrete

Follow this guide to make white concrete at home

  • Before I could mix up any concrete I needed to make some forms I’m making one foot by two foot forms out of three quarter inch thick melamine.
  • Cut all of the pieces to size with any track saw the side walls are about an inch and 3/4 tall and I’ll be making inch and a half thick pours.The track saw is super convenient because you can batch cut all of pieces to two feet long.We’ll be cutting the ends of the walls later but this is a great way to get a lot of pieces cut fast.
  • After installing my two sidewalls you could mark and cut your in pieces to length on the table saw if you don’t have a table saw don’t worry you could use a circular saw a miter saw even a jig saw.
  • To do this same task a table saw is just convenient for sneaking up on the line to get a really tight fit I chose to use pocket screws to attach my side walls to the rest of the melamine form this is the quick and easy way to assemble everything but totally not necessary.
  • Apply a coat of paste wax to the form you’ll want to apply a relatively thick coat and then let it cure for about 15 minutes before buffing it out doing this is going to allow the concrete to release from the form way easier it’s also gonna help when we install our silicone bead around the corners of the form.
  • I recommend black silicone caulk this way it is easier to see but you can use any color you want this is gonna seal the form and make everything completely watertight
  • Use grout tool to add a chamfer to the inside corners of the form which will be translated to the concrete pour applying the paste wax to the forum allows the excess silicone to wipe away from the form which I can then use a vacuum to clean up and that’s how you make one good concrete form
  • Use mask before mixing any of dry ingredients  whenever you mess with cement there’s a lot of dust that kicks up and you do not want to breathe.I recommend RZ mask it is super comfortable and perfect for this job for my first concrete test
  • Use one part cement two parts sand and three parts pea gravel.I drilled holes in the bottom of the cups that I use to scoop this gravel out with so that I could rinse it out in the faucet so that it didn’t stain my white concrete mix.
  • In order to make varraible strength you can have different ratios of these three ingredients to find out which one gives me the strongest result.
  • I mixed all of my tests the same way first I included all of my dry ingredients and mix those up so that they were thoroughly combined then I added my rocks and mixed one more time before adding any of the water and to make sure I filled my forms.
  • I did a double batch of all of my ingredients whenever you’re mixing up a batch of concrete you want to add your water slowly that way you don’t accidentally add too much the consistency that you’re going for is like super chunky peanut butter.You obviously want it to be liquid enough that it will fill all the corners of your form but solid enough to stay packed together
  • After filling up all of my forms I grabbed a couple of hammers and I made sure to knock out all of the air bubbles so that I had a good strong pour.
  • You can achieve the same results with a random orbit sander with no sanding pad against the form.I figured since i was doing all of these tests I should have some sort of a control so I did one pour with original quick read out of the bag.I did my best to mix this to the same consistency but I did make the mistake of over filling my form compared to the rest of the pores this gave me a thicker slab which ended up adding strength to it I guess it’s just a rookie mistake my bad.
  • Let concrete cure for two days before you release it from the forums.The slower you can let your concrete cure the stronger is going to eventually be
  • Concrete pores looked great the top face and the edges of these concrete pieces were super smooth and looked amazing.The one thing i would do differently though was the chamfer with the silicon caulk in the past.I’ve used a round fondant tool which i’ll leave linked below and that works way better.
  • Now line up all of concrete pieces that you can.Get a hammer and knock them in half.I was really curious to see the distribution of the aggregate once.
  • You could see a cross-section of each of these pieces you will be happy to see the concrete wasn’t super brittle except for this third test that one broke a lot easier
  • You have to hit  for quick release a little bit harder but it’s just that added thickness to the slab
  • This ended up looking awesome now.
  • Initially my plan wasn’t to use pea gravel my Home Depot just didn’t have a white aggregate available but now it’s got me wanting to do some sort of live edge concrete River table using the pea gravel .
  •  I can agree with you hitting the concrete slabs with a hammer is not a very accurate test so i wanted to do something that was a little bit more measurable.
  • I fully expected to stack some weight on these concrete slabs to see them break in half then i could measure how much weight it took but to my surprise this concrete was way stronger than expected it supported my whole weight with no problem all right so if this concrete can hold up to 90 pounds plus my 180 pounds we’re just gonna quit testing it and call it strong that’ll just be our new baseline
  • Now I probably don’t need to say this but don’t try this at home i know standing on a stack of weights being balanced on a concrete slab that’s balanced on a couple pieces of scrap melamine isn’t very safe but hey I’m not a scientist and I’m doing my best with these experiments.
  • After curb stomping my quick report it was time to test the batches that i have made from scratch and  was really happy to see that they supported the weight plates with no problems.
  • The first concrete test piece performed better than I expected it handled my weight plus the weight of the plates with no problem it wasn’t until I started trying to bounce on the concrete that it finally gave way after that i tested my second batch and it could hold my weight but not for a sustained period of time after a second it gave way my third batch of concrete performed the worst on this test just like the hammer test earlier I think not having enough aggregate just makes it crack way easier.

I am so glad that we got consistent results across the board showing the three part aggregate two parts sand and one part cement mixture was the best performing all around and so now that i know what the best mixture of ingredients is i want to take this test one step further in the next test

I want to use these white aquarium pebbles that I picked up instead of the brown pea gravel I want to make the widest possible concrete that’s why I’m using this aggregate.I just had a lot of the pea gravel so that’s why i used it during the strength testing i know we’ve already found out that you don’t really see a lot of aggregate at the surface of our pours but I’m curious whether the pea gravel was adding any bit of tint to our mixture for consistent results.I did my best to mix this to the same consistency as my prior tests the one thing i forgot though was to make sure my tripod was tightened.

When it comes to concrete and GF RC so I want to take his advice whenever i can get it. Allow these concrete pieces to set in their forms for two full days before you release them just like in my previous tests and you can see the contrast in the aggregate due to the moisture that’s still in the concrete.

Check it out after letting them sit for one more full day I’d knocked the concrete pieces in half so I can do another strength test.

Unfortunately the ultra white concrete did not perform as well it could support the weight plates fine just not me on top of it whoa I had to hit that a lot harder the good news though is that the concrete i made with the liquid fortifier was the strongest of all not only could i stand on it with the weights well it didn’t break until i basically jumped on it

That’s strong holy cow it was interesting to see that even though the aggregate settled to the bottom of the form it still was really strong.In this ultra white concrete looked amazing even though it wasn’t as strong it still performed decent and looks so cool so here you can see the difference in color it’s about a full shade off the smaller piece is one of the first concrete pours where the bigger piece is the ultra white.

So this blog has been a ton of fun but what did we learn well we learned that the best solid mix is three parts gravel two parts sand and one part cement.If you want a solid all-around mix that’s my recommendation if you’re doing something where you need a little bit of extra strength the concrete fortifier definitely made a noticeable improvement but I would say it’s probably not necessary especially if you reinforce your concrete either with rebar or fiberglass.

One last thing that you would note is that the white aquarium rocks did not perform as strong as the pea gravel and I think that’s just because the rocks themselves were a little bit brittle.At the end of the day there’s just a little bit of a trade-off you get a slightly wider end result but you sacrifice on strength just a little bit maybe just add some concrete fortifier.

So I really do hope you enjoyed this experimental blog if you did please give it a thumbs up that way this blog.