What does one cubic yard of river rock weigh?

Answer 1

One cubic yard of river rock will weigh around 4,050 lbs. or 2.03 tons

You can make this conversion as follows: The cubic foot weight of the material must first be known. If your dealing with stone such as to be laid up in a wall or used for masonry construction it is good to take a 12" x 12" x 12" cube box made of 18 gage sheet metal and put your stone in it filled to the boxes capacity and packed as tightly and firm as possible ( the more solid the more accurate) and put it on the scales. Do this three times with different stones each time and add the three weights together, then divide the sum by three to get the average weight per cubic foot. If there are many viods in between the stone in the cube box take this into consideration; it is not accually a cubic foot solid and allow for a viod factor of 5% to 8%, add this to the over all weight for an idea of what a cubic foot weighs.

Once you know the cubic foot weight all you have to do to know the ton amount is to multiply the weight per CF by 27 ( 27 is the number of cubic feet in a yard) and then divide their product by 2000 ( the number of pounds in a ton ) and that will be the number of tons per cubic yard or in your case pounds per cubic yard.

Example: Your River rock weight is say 150 lbs per cubic foot. Then one cubic yard weighs: 150 x 27 = 4050 lbs. So there are 4050/2000 tons in a CY of river rock or 2.03 tons.

Remember that a Cubic Yard is Volume and a Ton is Weight. One ton of feathers makes more cubic feet than say for instance one ton of silver. So to make this conversion you must know two constants, the weight per CF or CY for that matter and how many cubic feet you have. In this case it is 27 cubic feet or a "yard".

Awenow