Paving slabs suitable for a driveway

John71

We are planning on changing half of our front garden into a driveway, currently laid to lawn approx 4m x 17m. We are going to lay 2 lanes of paving slabs for the car to drive over and park on, and leave grass either side. I have been looking at various paving slabs but am not sure whether they would be suitable for a driveway. We will be digging out and laying the slabs on a hardcore base.
Is there a minimum recommended thickness for driveway slabs? The ones I have been looking at are 32 - 35mm.

MX5huggy

I would want at least 50mm

http://www.pavingexpert.com/pccflag1.htm

But the sub base is probably more important

mr_vampy

I used a combination of 600 x 600 and 300 x 600, 50mm thick paving slabs for my driveway, with a sub-base of 150mm

John71

Thanks, I will keep looking but it is hard to find slabs that are 50mm thick, unless I am looking at the wrong sites.

bobhawke

Taken from paving expert:

50mm thick flags, and not suitable for driveway use, unless laid on a 100mm concrete bed.

The problem with the thinner flags is that they tend to be wet cast and made from a mould with some sort of pattern. To reproduce the nice patterns they use fine grained concrete which has limited resistance to abrasion.

bobhawke

John71 wrote: »

Thanks, I will keep looking but it is hard to find slabs that are 50mm thick, unless I am looking at the wrong sites.

You can either get plain 600x600x50mm concrete flags or you can get much more expensive stone.

ormus

50mm is best but 32mm will do at a pinch, if the sub base is done properly.