My ‘hobby’ for the summer is to build a parking space for occassional use in my front garden. I’ve got some grit-stone slabs which aren’t perfectly flat, but will be perfect for the planted, rustic driveway I’m going for. I was planning to lay a load of MOT type 1 down, but my neighbour has offered a load of rubble (not sure how much) that I can use as foundations.

If there’s enough will this do, or would topping it off with some compressed MOT type 1 give me a more stable surface to work with?

I’m planning to have 2 troughs about 5″ deep of hardcore / rubble and then mortar down the stone slabs and then have soil / gravel between them.

Depends on the hardcore. Type 1 is intended to be compacted and it therefore a given spec. It’ll be alot easier to run a whacker over this rather than irregular lumps of concrete. This is important if you expect to lay slabs flat over the top of it.

A bulk back of MOT is only going to be £40 or so.

That’s what I was thinking, however the slabs don’t need to be perfectly flat but i figure they’ll dip / crack if there’s any movement.

Is a hand rammer / tamper up to the job or shall I just pay £30 to do it properly with a whacker?

Depends on how much whacking you want to do!

http://www.pavingexpert.com/ is the place to look.

It’s probably not a big issue for what you have planned but I’d check local by laws re creating parking area on front gardens – some places are getting quite hot on enforcement as they perceive any extra run-off etc as an issue (I assume there’s a drop kerb in place already?)

Cheers, already checked with council aboutn permeability and when I asked the question about what type of sub-base (type 1 or 3) they didn’t seem to know what I was talking bout, only that I can only replace a current impermeable top coat.

I thought this thread was about subwoofers 🙁

For what you need to build, it’s irrelevant whether it’s for occasional or permanent use – it still needs to carry the weight of the vehicle.

I thought it was about a mobile trident base