Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Gravel road maintenance

Looking for tips or suggestions for maintaining my gravel driveway. I have a private drive that is about 1/2 mile in length and it has several steep hills and sharp turns throughout. Up to this point I have only ever used my loader on my tractor to level it & maintain it. Lots of bigger potholes this time of year after a winter of freezing and thawing. Plus, always dealing with some washing out on the hills after heavy rains. Always an endless battle.

Anyway, I would like to try some other means of maintaining the road. Been looking @ box blades for behind the tractor. Also curious about the 3pt road grader attachments made by Bush Hog. Then there is the regular blades that can be had with hydraulic tilt & angle features plus bolt on end plates to help keep from losing your rock out the ends. I'm curious what you folks think is a good implement for road maintenance?

FWIW, my tractor is about 64hp with FWA so it can handle about most any attachments up that hp range. Please let me hear your opinions. TIA.

Get a pull behind stone rake and a back blade

Or id you can find an old pull behind grader that is still servicable

We used one of those bush hog graders And they worked as long as the gravel was all uniform. Like 2B or amaller, bigger rocks it just bounced over

A horse grader might work for you.

a grader attachment is probably your best bet for maintaining a crown on the road which gets the water off fast, the probable I see is that if you have hills over4-6% grade I don't know if your tractor will blade uphill depends on road material and finess of handeling the blade for a fine cut.
If you are always gradeing downhill you'll lose all of your material pretty quick.
You understand that your gravels always go to the outside and end up in the ditch and build in the center. How much superelevation do you maintain on your corners in relation to your speed and degree of turn??

Asphalt is your friend but it does seam to cost money

hope this helps , might pose more questions.

norm

I've heard rumor that dragging an old, weighted down, box spring behind the tractor can be a great solution.

.... half tempted to give it a shot

Land plane

Are you maintaining a gravel road with one of these? Looks nice.

I prefer pull type rather than 3-point attachments for leveling.

The 3pt is handier to maneuver but there is way less control.

++1 on the land plane.Use mine on 2 miles of gravel private road.Works great

I think that you would find that your old box spring would be quickly destroyed. Our gravel driveway is 1.3 miles long and most of it is about a 10% - 12% grade. When we built it, we invested heavily in good base rock, which fortunately came from the construction of the road itself. We ran on this base rock for two years as we built our house and shop. We then had a grader re-contour the base rock and applied 800 yards of gravel. Our road has a good crown which has been maintained for the last 7 years. I maintain the driveway with a 30 hp tractor and a 6' back blade, but with the blade turned around (so the cutting blade is reversed). I feed in about 20 yards of gravel per year and make multiple passes to pull the edges and then to spread the gravel as evenly as possible. I have been tempted to use our 6' heavy duty pasture harrow for the spreading part, but never have. My setup does not have hydraulic down pressure, which I wish that it did, but I do add extra weight to the 3 point back blade. A huge aspect of gravel driveways is how people drive on them. Fortunately for me, it is just the wife and I and we only are on the driveway a couple time per week. I have asked UPS and Fed Ex to leave packages at our lower inner gate which they are more than happy to do as it shortens their route. Their trucks really play heck with a gravel road, especially the way they are typically driven. And always remember to "roll the road" i.e. vary the path up and down the driveway to the extent that you can.

This may work also.....

These are popular in NW PA. We get some nasty frost heaves and these will remedy that. Easy to use, good results.

http://www.drpower.com/power-equipment/power-graders/

looks good but don't like the fact it cuts your crown out


doesn't that lead to a river down the middle of the driveway when it rains?

I need a tractor!

I like to use a landscape rake instead of a blade
Get one that can be angled in both directions .

For the washouts, you have to give the water a place to go, either through ditching or culverts

That's what I use to maintain the dirt road to my place. The county doesn't grade the road often enough to keep the washboard out so I'll run over the road a couple of times about once a week.

I have a drag that I pull behind the land plane to smooth it out even more. When the road is really dry it takes longer but after a rain you can really make it smooth.

A civil engineer once told me that water control is 90% of road building.

I.E. if you don't have proper ditches on the uphill side of the driveway and sufficient culverts underneath to handle the runoff, you'll be in constant grader mode.

Not currently, worked great on previous place.

The blades are angled so I start from the outside edge of the road and work my way to the center to preserve the crown.

Around here they sell a brand called called "Road Boss", and yes, it is the cat's meow for maintaining dirt or gravel drives. They sell around here in 6 foot to 12 foot width depending on your tractor size.

Mine is eight foot and is home made with industrial grader bits. It was duplicated from a Road Boss built tool. It weighs about the same as a three bottom roll over plow, so it needs a fairly large tractor to handle it. But I have often seen lighter models offered for sale at the "hobby farm" stores. I think King Cutter makes one and also Priefert (sp?).

I maintain a crown in the road by adjusting one three point arm a bit higher than the other and then working the two sides of the road with the high side of the grader to the middle.

I have my own gravel pit which contains up to ten inch river rock as well as sand and smaller stones. I used the 72 horse David Brown and loader with my grader to rebuild the first quarter mile of my drive this spring while it was still soft.

I had holes in the road which swallowed those eight to ten inch rocks. I carried loader buckets of "gravel" to the far end of the road and then graded back toward the house. The grader dropped the small stuff in the little holes and carried the large along until a hole came along into which the large rocks would drop. Then I went back with more loads of "gravel" and went over it again and again until the big rocks were buried in sand and small stone.

That section of road worked out to about twelve feet wide and smooth like the county roads.

On the sandy sections of road, it works much like a small road grader. Mine will lift and push more than a yard of material from a soft section, which will then drop into any pot holes further down the road. Or if you do not want it to cut so deeply you can either lengthen the third link or lift the unit a slight bit.

Ditch it and crown it. You will never get rid of washouts without a proper crown and adequate ditches.

You can pay to have it coated in Chloride as that makes it very hard. It also makes it difficult to blade and repair with light weight equipment.