Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First time concrete-er and decided to use this mold to create about a 50 foot front walkway to my house. I elected to try the dual-width walkway method which gives you a 4 foot wide walkway instead of 2. The main disadvantage to the dual-width method, besides the extra work, is added difficulty making it "turn". If you can do it right, though, I think it looks signficiantly better being 4 feet wide instead of a narrow 2 foot path. Some notable things I learned: -You do not need to buy the 80 pound bags like it says on the instructions. The form actually takes a little less than one 60 pound bag of correctly mixed quickrete, even after packing it in very tightly. -For a big job, setup a station next to your walkway and do a little bit each day. It's quite tiring to do even 2 to 4 of these molds correctly in a single session. The most I did in a long full day of work was about 12 molds. I was mixing the concrete by hand, then spending a solid 15-20 minutes per mold packing the conrete into every nook and cranny, then cleaning up. Overall I averaged about 1 hour per day doing 2 molds side-to-side and slowly got the job done. -The instructions for "turning" your walkway are complete garbage. They instruct you to just turn and push the mold down onto the one you just did and fill in the gaps. If mixing your concrete right, it will be quite solid already in the form when you lift the mold away, even after just 15 minutes. So I found it nearly impossible to push down at all onto a previous mold, let alone not having it end up looking crumbly and messy. Also, this method of turning simple won't work for dual-width walkways like mine, the geometry doesn't really work out if you think about it. -My method for "turning" the walkway worked pretty well. Basically, just slowly stop filling in the mold on one side and start partially filling in another mold on the opposite side. You may be limited to 90 degree turns for the most part, though, which is all I needed. Buy some thick rubber gloves to hand-pack in the concrete into the mold. It is much easier than trying to use a trowel. -The mold results in some pretty large gaps between the pavers. Some of mine were up to 1/2 inch gaps. This results in the stones being quite wobbly until you lock them in place with the polymeric sand. It's expensive sand, but highly recommended to make the walkway feel solid, and it obviously looks better. -If you are doing the dual-width walkway, buying two of these molds will not make it go any faster, unless you have a second person in theory. Overall I highly recommend the mold. It's a lot of work but you end up saving up to thousands of dollars.