We have a driveway now, it has clay and fill covered with 6″ crushed limestone, covered with 3/4″ down. It is holding up really well. Our concrete guy has been hauling cement wash with a tandem dump truck, I think it’s weight is around 50-60 thousand pounds it’s near the legal road weight limit. The driveway is happy with it, it’s well packed and will handle cement trucks. We got the piles for our house drilled and poured, they’re 19-20 feet deep and 16″ across. they would have been deeper but at the 21 foot mark there is silt, it’s all clay up to that point, so the piles are drilled two feet above the silt.
The piles support the building, they are made by drilling into the ground and filling the hole with rebar and concrete they support the building two ways, first they support by friction (the friction between the pile’s wall and the clay in the earth), second they have the end sitting on solid clay. The piles that I have will support 30,000 pounds each, I think we have 22 piles, 16 on the outside and the rest in the middle.