Hot rubberized crack filling for driveways and parking lots around Lexington. An open crack works like a funnel. It collects rain off the surface and delivers it straight to the stone and soil the asphalt is resting on, and in a winter that keeps crossing the freezing line, that water does its damage underneath, where nobody sees it until the surface drops. Filling is how the funnel gets shut.
Walk the drive with a coin in your pocket. Width decides almost everything about how a crack is treated, and it takes about two minutes to sort yours into one of four groups.
Filler bonds to the walls of a crack. If those walls are lined with dust, grit, grass roots and last autumn's leaves, it bonds to that instead, and it lifts out in a strip the first time the crack moves. So the preparation takes longer than the filling.
Weeds and grass are pulled out by the root. A plant left in a crack keeps growing up through fresh filler.
A narrow working crack can be routed, cut into a clean channel so there is a reservoir for the rubber to sit in rather than a thin skin over the top.
Compressed air, or a hot air lance, clears loose material and drives off damp. A wet crack does not take filler well.
Rubberized material goes in from the bottom up, finished level with the surface or in a narrow band over the top, and firms up as it cools.
All three are sold as crack filler, and they behave very differently once winter arrives.
Hot pour. Blocks of rubberized asphalt melted in a heated kettle and applied molten. The industry specification for this class of product is ASTM D6690, hot applied joint and crack sealants. It grips the walls of a clean crack, stays elastic in cold weather, and stretches as the crack widens in January instead of letting go. This is what we use.
Cold pour. A liquid from a jug, usually an emulsion. It is easy to use and it is better than nothing, but it shrinks as the water or solvent leaves it, which means a deep crack often needs a second pass, and it generally has less stretch than the hot product.
Caulk tube. Fine for a homeowner topping up two or three thin cracks between visits. It is not built for a wide crack or a long run, and a gun full at a time is slow going on a lot. If you are doing your own drive, sealing your own driveway covers the rest of that day.
A single crack wandering across firm asphalt is a filling job. A patch of small cracks joined up into interlocking plates, like the skin on a reptile's back, is something else. That pattern means the surface has stopped being supported from below, usually because water got into the base and softened it, and every vehicle crossing it now flexes those plates against each other.
Running filler into every line of that web is money spent on material that will crack straight back open. The area needs cutting out and rebuilding with new base and hot mix, covered on driveway and asphalt repair. Block cracking is different again: large rectangles across an old drive, caused by the asphalt drying out with age rather than by the base. Those are filled normally.
The National Weather Service normals for Lexington put annual precipitation close to 50 inches and the average January just under 34 degrees. A winter that sits right on the freezing point freezes and thaws over and over, and with that much rain there is nearly always water in an open crack when it does. Ice takes up more room than water, so each freeze pries the crack a little wider, and each thaw lets more water down.
What sits under the stone matters too. The USDA soil survey describes the Maury series, a typical soil of the Inner Bluegrass, as a silt loam weathered from phosphatic limestone with a subsoil that grades down into clay. Clay takes water in slowly, so water that comes through a crack tends to linger in the base above it rather than draining away. A base that stays wet softens under load and heaves when it freezes, and that is how a crack becomes a dip and then an alligator patch.
A foot of open crack costs very little to close. The rebuild it can turn into does not. The Fayette County page has more on the local weather record.
Sealer is about as thick as a coat of paint. Brushed or sprayed over an open crack, it runs down into the gap, and the crack shows through as a dark line within weeks. So on a sealcoating job every qualifying crack is filled first, the rubber is left to firm up, and the coat goes over the whole surface, filled cracks included.
Be ready for this: a filled crack usually stays faintly visible under new sealer as a slightly raised or glossier line. That is the filler doing its job. A contractor who promises the cracks will vanish is either skipping the filling or planning to hide them in a thick coat that will not last.
Filling without sealing is also a perfectly sound choice for a year when the surface itself still looks healthy. The driveway self check helps decide which year you are in.
Asphalt shrinks as it cools, so a crack is at its widest in cold weather and its narrowest on a hot afternoon. Filler put in during the heat of summer goes into a narrow gap and then has to stretch all winter. Filler put in during mild weather goes in closer to the width it will face in January, which asks less of it.
That is the reason cooler, dry weather before winter is the favoured window for crack work, and why a crack noticed in late summer is worth dealing with before the first hard frost rather than after it. The surface has to be dry and the forecast clear for the day, and the guide to timing in Kentucky explains how that fits around sealing.
On a lot the footage adds up fast. Long cracks form where one paving pass met the next, along curbs, around drains and across drive lanes, and a lot that has gone a few years without attention can hold several hundred feet of it. The upside is that hot rubber sets in minutes once it cools, so filling rarely closes a lot for long. Rows are coned off a section at a time and handed back the same day.
Filled lines on a lot that is being sealed get the same treatment as a driveway: fill, let it firm, seal, then restripe. See commercial sealcoating and parking lot striping for the rest of that sequence.
When it is part of a sealcoating job, crack filling is inside the one price per square foot, along with small patches and restriping. It is not a second line added once the crew is on site.
Ordered on its own, crack filling is quoted per job after a look, because a drive with two cracks and a lot with a web of them are not the same afternoon. The quote says which cracks are being filled, which are being left and why, and whether anything on the property needs a patch instead.
Hot filler is firm once it has cooled, often within the hour on a mild day. If the driveway is being sealed as well, the sealer sets the wait, not the filler.
A filled crack can reopen along its edges after several winters, and new cracks form as asphalt ages. Checking and topping up every couple of years keeps it ahead of the water.
That joint opens because asphalt and concrete move differently. It gets filled like any other crack. If the asphalt has dropped below the slab, it needs a patch as well.
You can, but they still have to come out by the root before filling. Dead growth left in a crack is exactly the debris the filler cannot bond to.
Send the address through the form, and a photo of the worst crack with a coin beside it if you can. You will hear which cracks need filling, whether any of the damage is past filling, and a price. The work is done by local independent contractors.
