Now for the membrane...
Ok - so we've done the fencing - you have the boards fixed as in the diagram above. So now we bring in the membrane. You'll need 3 rolls, of 100m long, by 4 m wide. I know - if you work it out, its 2 rolls - but you need more - here's why. Your 2 rolls will exactly cover the 40x20 area. The third roll will give you the 1 metre overlap of each run down the school 4 metres wide, it'll give you the bit at each end where you run it up the boards and staple it, and ditto at the sides. Dont forget we made the manege (menage) 21x41 metres as well - so we had room for the dressage markers and cones. That's where the three rolls comes in. If you order 6, you'll have the right amount for the layer on top of the stone too. Order some wide double sided sticky tape too - they usually sell the stuff with the membrane. Email us, and we'll sell you some - we have an arrangement with the manufacturers and and can send it out, together with drainage materials, carriage paid direct to your door. Current price per roll for non-woven membrane, delivery included, is £142. We can supply drainage pipe with the same arrangement - email us and we'll put you in touch with our supply warehouse directly.
So.. start stapling and unrolling, and taping your joints. I generally hold the membrane down with little piles of stone so the wind can't blow it away. When it's all unrolled, cut, stapled, held down and flattened off, Aunt Caroline will be slobbering uncontrollably - it now looks like a manege (menage)....
What stone to use for the drainage bed of your menage?
Well - this is the pricey bit. At around £25 a tonne, you are going to need a lot of stone. You need to be using clean, dust free 40mm stone. Don't be tempted to use bigger than this - its horrible - it may be cheaper, but you'll never get a flat surface. You want 40mm clean stone - not limestone if you can avoid it - although the hard bluish grey limestone is ok if IT IS CLEAN OF DUST!!! Don't get thata soft, crumbly Cotswold stuff that breaks down in 5 minutes and forms a rocky, dusty cake that would make a base for a nuclear missile silo - you want an open, porous drainage bed. Don't get mixed sizing - quarries will try to sell you 40mm to dust - NO! You want Clean, 40 mm - that's it. Nothing more, nothing less. Preferably granite or dolerite.
And so to the amounts... 41 x 21 x .15 equals about 130 cubic metres of stone to fill the bed to 150mm depth. At a specific gravity of about 2.4 tonnes to the cubic metre, that's just over 300 tonnes, or using 17 tonne waggonloads, 18 loads. Or £7000 or thereabouts. Start tipping in the gateway, and always work over your stone so you never touch the membrane. At this point, your friendly JCB driver needs to be VERY careful not to slew the machine around and grind the stone in circles - the membrane underneath will move and tear - and you'll be in real trouble. This is a very delicate, careful operation - do it right, and you have a surface for life - get it wrong, and Caroline will be piaffing to a delicate squelching noise. You should, after 18 loads, and careful JCBing, have a nice flat surface, checked by your driver with the same laser level and staff we used before, which is + or - about 25 mm in level across the surface.
And now for the boring bit - more membrane...
Remember the other 3 rolls - you need them. Same thing - staple about half way up the edge of the last retaining board so you don't have unsightly white membrane sticking up above the surface - then roll it out and tape it as you did before.
Woo Hoo!!
You are now ready to install Caroline's newly purchased sooper dooper All Weather Riding Surface, which, depending on her pockets, is either waxed sand, with all sorts of nice additives like bits of carpet, fibres, bits of shredded rubber door seals, and whatever else the manufacturers can dream up to chuck into it, or she might have had a bad time on the stock market, in which case we're talking about shredded carpet out of old cars at a bargain basement price, with some chopped old tyres thrown in for good measure. Surface selection is a HUGE subject - and we are happy to talk about it - but not right now.. Discussion welcome - we charge £10 a minute, payable up front, and we'll give you lots of samples if you bring a carton of beer for the boys. Seriously though, we've seen a lot of different surfaces - and there are two companies that stand out as Premium and Good value - a bottle of wine, and we'll tell you who they are - check the photo on the manege page for one of them. Riding surfaces should be nice and soft, but not running, so your horse goes through the sand and breaks into the membrane - that's why we use binders like fibre to hold the sand together. If the sand is waxed, it makes for a really good horse riding surface - and if it is also bound with fibre and rubber, it becomes slightly springy, so you can do showjumping with no danger of going through the surface and into the membrane below. A good surface for working with carriage horses and carriages is waxed sand too - it's lovely and springy, whilst not allowing the wheels to sink into it.
Same calculations as for the stone - you'll need 130 cubic metres, and slightly less weight, but the actual waggon loads will be about the same because the weight / volume relationship changes. Maybe a couple of loads less.. When it arrives, same approach. Work over it. Never slew the machine. Gently, bentley. Get it level, run the laser over it - then hire one of those big Bomag road rollers you sit on, and drive around all day until the surface is nicely squished down and compacted. Wax surfaces need this more than sand / rubber, or just plain carpet fibres, which as you can imagine, are a bit hard to squish with a vibrating roller.
And then...
Crack The Champers For The Men that built the darned thing. Caroline will already be piaffing and pirouetting on her nice shiny new All Weather Riding Manege ( Menage ), and the rest of you can now settle down to arguing about the relative merits of which tractor / leveller combination is best for grooming the surface. Now that's another story, for which we might have to introduce another page to the site - Toys For the Boys - Arena Grading equipment, Menage Grading equipment, Manege Levelling and Grading ... I'm not sure what to call the page, but we'll find something suitable. We'll have to do another page for the tractors, then the sooper suckers for the poo... the list goes on.
Budget for menage construction:
Depending on the final surface, this figure can vary a great deal. There is, however, a bottom line below which you really cannot go - this works out at around £15,000 and is based on the appropriate quantities of materials described below, with a rough allowance for labour and machinery to build it. If someone quotes less than this - they are cutting corners somewhere - go through the quote with a toothcomb - check specifications for materials, and insist on samples of everything before committing. I've seen schools built that have cost upwards of £100,000, but never much below £18,000.
Working Surface for your menage:
This is the point at which we see the most variance. To some extent it is covered in the next section, selection of appropriate surface, but we'll briefly discuss surfaces here too. To protect the membrane which covers the drainage bed, we usually use a layer of clean, washed silica sand. This is NOT the material sold in Cornwall and Devon as silica sand, which is a clay ridden by-product of china clay mining. It usually comes from the quarries in Cheshire which are worked for foundry sand, and contains little or no fines and impurities. You need to allow for a depth of at least 50mm, preferably 100mm. Translated into volumes and tonnes, you are looking at around 80 cubic metres, (at 100mm thickness) or roughly 140 tonnes - assuming decent sized lorries carrying 12 to 17 tonnes, you are going to need at least 9 or 10 lorry loads.
There ARE surfaces around these days which don't need sand underneath them. If you are using the shredded carpet / insulation material derived from scrap cars, a 6 to 9 inch layer of this material can be laid directly on top of the membrane. ( There are some vendors who insist that with this material you dont need a membrane over the stone - DON'T omit the membrane - its a fatal error you'll regret!) I would still protect it with a little sand anyway - just to prevent sharp hooves nicking it, but it comes down to choice and budget at this point. Essentially, if the material you are using doesnt break down in any way (eg shredded carpet / insulation, medical rubber or shredded window seals) you can get away with it. Shredded car tyres do tend to break down and block drainage beds after a while, so be careful that if using this material, you make sure it cannot get to the drainage bed. It is also on the list of nasty environmental stuff that councils won't approve these days on account of toxic runoff. Our worst case surface is shredded wood - several vendors are offering shredded pallets, claiming that they dont break down - I've seen a surface made from this material which in 2 years had almost rotted away. Bark chip is the same - it rots down, breaks up, and produces large amounts of dust in summer. Steer clear from it if you can afford to - its a false economy.
What surface to select.. sand, or a mix...
This is a tricky question to answer at the best of times. We always say to people that they need to go and ride as many surfaces as they can before making a decision. If you can't ride it, ask people. Try to ask professionals who know the effect the surface is having on their horses and riding - and ask showjumpers as well as dressage riders. You will need to give thought to what you are using the manege (menage ) for - if you are mostly jumping, it is more important to protect the membrane with sand, and to select a surface that gives a little natural spring - if dressage, try to avoid anything that your horse sinks into or that causes him to drag his feet. In general, surfaces for jumping tend to be bigger, springier materials than those for dressage - the shredded carpet / insulation material is ideal for this, although it can be used for dressage too, because its fairly light, and tends to bed down over time into a springy mat. Silica sand with shredded door seals, medical rubber, or chopped telephone cables are all good surfaces for flatwork. The best surfaces these days tend to contain wax - it holds everything together, stops the sand blowing away, and provides a springy, resilient surface - but... it's expensive, as the best always is. Sand should always be clean silica sand, preferably the stuff from Cheshire - NOT yer average building sand which has clay content and is suicide for a manege.
As I said before - budget surfaces are hard to find - we've been working on one way to achieve this - and can supply a mix which you can add to silica sand to create a lovely springy surface - its been developed in Germany for dressage riders - and is a chopped fibre / rubber fibre mix. As a budget price, you can buy enough of this to do a 40 x 20 m school for around £4000 - so add this to the cost of the silica sand for the total surface cost. It is mixed into the surface with a power harrow or stone burier. There is a similar surface sold which is called Turf Float which is very good too- but the material we use also has rubber fibres added to it, which binds the sand and makes it a lot springier. It comes packed on pallets, so you just spread it on the surface of your sand, and then mix it in. After years of research, I reckon this is one of the best alternatives at the moment for a budget surface. We source it from the people who actually make the geotextile membrane, and it contains finely chopped bits of membrane - the photo gives you some idea:
If you would like to consider using this surface, cost for a 40 x 20 manege is approx. £4,000 delivered to your door. Delivery charges vary a bit, as does final price depending on euro exchange rate. We think this is one of the best alternatives out there at the moment - its used on a lot of surfaces in Germany, and those guys know how to do it right.
