Lexington sits on a karst landscape where the Ordovician Lexington Limestone shapes everything below grade. With over 320,000 residents in the metro area and a construction market driven by medical campuses and infill development, knowing exactly what you're digging into is non-negotiable. A proper grain size analysis tells you more than just sand and gravel percentages—it reveals how water will move through the formation, how the material will compact, and whether those fine-grained residues signal a tricky clay that could swell during wet winters. Our lab runs the full mechanical sieve stack plus hydrometer sedimentation following ASTM D422 and D7928, because skipping the silt-clay fraction in this town is like ignoring the limestone pinnacles beneath the topsoil. When foundation performance depends on drainage behavior, we often pair the particle size curve with an in-situ permeability test to confirm field hydraulic conductivity against lab predictions.
If you don't measure what passes the #200 sieve, you're designing blind—especially on Lexington's clay-rich residuum.
