Wondering how to go about maintaining the surface of a 900 foot unpaved driveway. Top course is screened (1″ minus) bank run gravel, very clean stuff, put in last summer (base year before).
Short of calling the excavator back (good luck–they’re hard to pin down), what’s the drill on maintaining the surface? We’ve got some high-center areas now (not enough to scrape the bottom of vehicles yet) plus a few ruts in the wheel tracks after a culvert froze up (extreme cold last winter, culverts froze up all over the area) and spring runoff washed down part of the road.
What’s the drill on grading or raking the surface even again? Best done with a light tractor perhaps, or something else? Need more gravel?
Thanks for the tips.
Replies
back in the good old days [lol ] i had a car lot with about 35,000 sg ft of gravel .i had a tractor with loader,box blade etc. the very best thing i found was a old [i mean old] box spring.this is the kind where their is no covering on it just a wire cage. tie it to the back of a garden tractor and just start pulling. if it seems to not be digging hard enough throw a couple of cement blocks on it. they are hard to find [in fact if i saw one tommorrow i'd latch onto it] check garage sales, salvation army stores and so on. probably set you back 5.00. something else is a landscape rake that pulls behind a garden tractor,doesn't work as good and cost about 450. but if you live in the right neighbor hood they won't laugh and point at you ,like when they see you out pulling your bed around!!!! larry
I recall now that the excavators said something about dragging a box spring--I'll keep my eye out and see if I can pick one up.
Thought about back-dragging with my snowplow blade but I'm not sure that would work very well.
I swear, you and I have too much in common. My drive is a quarter mile long too and it wasn't built right to start with when I bought the property.
if your tracks are sinking that much in the clay soil , you don't have a good base toi start with. Or course good baase material is expensive around here, but at least you don't hgave to pay fery charges to get it there.
Here is what I do.
On the bigger pothoiles, I am always finding bricks to bring home and lay inb herringbone pattern along with enough sopil to hoild them in place. Then, every year, I hire a wheeler load of stone to be delivered sprinled along whatever is the worst part of the drive. As the stone keeps working in, the drive keeps getting better every year at about a grand a year.
Another thing that helps is to be sure you have drainage. Wet soil is soft and sluices around to make ruts and high centers. it is a plastic medium. So I have traded for use of a backhoe or excavator to dig the ditches deeper and to backdrag the surface smooth
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I was told by a local engineer that the bank run gravel these excavators use is some of the best he's seen--but I guess it still isn't as good as 6-inch minus crushed rock or whatever the DOT specs on their roads for the base. But a lot cheaper!
Actually we don't really have any sinkholes per se, just one area (where the culvert froze) that got saturated and washed out a bit, and that's where the wheel tracks sank. Most of the drive looks pretty good still.
I don't think we have anything deep enough to actually put bricks in like you do, but that sounds like a good idea. Pretty soon you'll have a million-dollar highway there!
We have a half-mile long gravel road into our hunting camp. My dad worked at Dow Chemical and got a bag of calcium chloride (Dow has a trade name for it that I've forgotten--Dow-pel or Dow-flake or something) and sprinkled this on the road, especially where the gravel was washing out. That stuff is amazing--held the gravel in place for many years. One thing, it attracts water from the air, so store it closed up or it will draw enough water to create a puddle. (Maybe you can't get it anymore due to worries about "the environment".
Yeah, I guess they now recommend some other dry alkaline compound for the same thing--forget the name of it, it's pretty close.
Supposedly it also keeps the dust down. I haven't used any yet but maybe I should keep some on hand.
Seems to me I read somewhere that they used to spray used motor oil on the unpaved roads to keep down the dust in late summer. Guess that was in the days when everybody just dumped their used oil in the woods behind the house anyway (and chuck the cans, and the junk vehicles, down in the ravine!)
You can get calcium chloride all day long in bags. definitely don't want to store it on the floor. It will suck moisture out of the air and puddle bad! But by sprinkling it on the drive, it not only keeps the dust down, the moisture helps with compaction of fiones to make a harder surface in dry weather that lastes a bit longer in wet weather.
If (disclaimer here - I don't do this and DEP doesn't like it) I were to use motor oil on it, I would cut it half and half with kero and use a garden sprayer. That would take care of those weeds in the center strip and kill the mosquitoes in the ditch. Or so I've heard...
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Dragging a box spring and/or adding more gravel isn't going to help. My drive is 1800 feet long and it's constant battle to keep it driveable. Dragging a box spring will pull some of the gravel from the crowns to the low spots but that is cosmetic fix only. Gravel doesn't stay where you put it so in no time at all you'll be repeating yourself. I spent a fortune in gravel and time before I found out this important lesson. The only way to fill holes and ruts is with base. Base packs and fills and won't spread. I'm too cheap to spend the $10,000 in repairs my drive really needs so once a year I get one or two loads of base and spread it over all the holes with a small box blade. Takes me about 4 hours tractor work but then I'm good for another year with maybe one light touchup.
Can you get any blacktop millings from any road resurfacing projects nearby ? We have a long driveway consisting of geotextile fabric which keeps the material on top from sinking in to the ground. On top of the fabric is about 80 loads of shale, on the shale is blacktop millings from local road projects a good portion of it was free. I have a tractor with a box blade and landscape rake for maintenance. After about a year of the sun heating the surface of the driveway it has turned the milled blacktop back into pavement. I still have to rake some portions especially after a heavy downpour we have a steep driveway and the light stuff likes to flow downhill.
drainage makes the road - - make sure that the road bed is elevated and a ditch/ditches allow the road itself to be a dry ribbon - -
beyond that, the road should have a crown so that precipitation/snow melt flows off the road and into the ditches - -
where you are rutted, I'd suggest hauling in some larger aggregate to fill the ruts, then some driveway mix to smooth it out - -
a box blade is a good tool for maintaining roads - - they are commonly availible around here, they drag behind a tractor (mounted on the 3-point hitch), have some chisel points to loosen problem areas so aggregate can be redistributed, or with the points retracted, will move loose material, collecting gravel in the 'box' and dropping it in the ruts - -
if I infer correctly, you don't have a tractor - - how about a neighbor? - - buy the blade for $250, let the tractor owner use it in exchange for a yearly tune up of your drive?
I got an old POS skid loader with teeth on the bucket. It has well paid for itself over the last 10 years maintaining the drive. Drag backwards to level. Easy to move stone as it migrates downhill and I'm out in 20 minutes after even the hardest of snows.
One big problem with stone drives is the drivers. On a new drive everyone goes like a bat out of hell. Well as you drive that way notice how the vehicle continues to bounce after each little bump. Continue to do this and in no time flat you'll have a washboard that'll knock out your fillings.
You're right about the drivers. . .worst is the FedEx guy, who just about rolled his van turning in off the blacktop one day.
Then there was the dude in the box truck who, after delivering some windows, proceeded to slowly wander off the road on his way out and had to get yanked back with a tractor.
Or the concrete guy who, with a full truck (35 tons GVW), came barreling across the bridge at 40 mph--cracked the center brace like matchstick. Luckily that was only the temporary bridge I put in for the construction access!
(Of course I won't mention the time I was plowing and dropped two wheels off the apron into the ditch--next year I put up wooden stakes to mark the shoulder!)
Here's a fairly comprehensive document that will have most of what you'll need to know about taking care of dirt roads.
http://www.state.ma.us/dep/brp/wm/files/dirtroad.pdf
David Doud is right, it's all about drainage. If you can pitch the road to drain, everything else will be easier.
Nothing beats a grader for this, it's worth getting on the excavation contractor's schedule for that.
A variant of the bedspring is a section of chain link fence, a railroad tie, and a few concrete blocks. It will smooth the surface, but it won't fix the problem.
DRC
Hey, thanks for the link. Tried Googling something along those lines but kept coming up blank. Looks like a lot of good info. in there.
I'll see what it would cost to get a bona fide grader out here.
The road drains well and is in pretty nice shape except for where the culvert froze up and part of the road got saturated and washed by spring runoff/rain. I dug some emergency diversion ditches as best I could at the time by hand which helped a little, but need to make sure that culvert drains next year. Problem is we had severe cold and little snow cover, so frost penetrated extremely deep--swale below the culvert froze, quit draining, backed up until before long the culvert pipe was a solid block of ice. Towns and Highway Departments were out there constantly dealing with similar problems.
Just came across this interesting contraption that mounts onto pickup truck snowplow headgear:
http://www.ruralhometech.com/fr/main.php
Aside from hawking their product, this site also had some good detailed discussion of dirt road maintenance.
I also read somewhere on the web that a guy from Maine came up with this solution to frozen culverts: run a piece of bare 14" wire suspended through the culvert, and tie off to metal stakes on the shoulder. If you get in a situation where the culvert freezes up, hook the wires up to a welder and thaw out a channel in the culvert. Interesting idea. . .sounds plausible, anyway.