Maintaining sandy roads

[scott123456789]

Is a box blades as good as anything else? Does have large sandstone rocks occasionally.

[MtnViewRanch]

Is a box blades as good as anything else? Does have large sandstone rocks occasionally.

Just my , but it is very hard to beat a land plane grading scraper for maintaining about any natural surfaced road.

[jenkinsph]

Agree with using the landplane as Brian shows. these are much easier to use than the boxblade.

About the sandstone I would gather what I could when planing the road and throw the rest in the ditch. If you have a lot of larger rocks on the surface you should consider adding some base course (3/4" to fines) and cover with clean 3/4" rock. I have dealt with this in numerous ways and have had to run a rock bucket to gather the larger surface rock. A landscape rake can also help gather the rock but at any rate I recommend you get the larger loose rocks off the road surface.

[scott123456789]

This is for maintaining roads on a moderate sized ranch. Hunting, fishing cruising access. Mostly knocking down the centers to get trucks or the Kubota rtv through.

[jenkinsph]

This is for maintaining roads on a moderate sized ranch. Hunting, fishing cruising access. Mostly knocking down the centers to get trucks or the Kubota rtv through.

I would run the landplane and call it good then.

[scott123456789]

For tighter work /really rough stuff is the lane still superior to the box?

[jenkinsph]

For tighter work /really rough stuff is the lane still superior to the box?

What we used to do on our ranch in New Mexico is have a motorgrader touch up the roads every other year. I used a 10' rearblade for maintaining in between. Even so it is hard to have a decent road without enough fines.

Comparing a boxblade and a landplane scraper blade, both are available with rippers and both have blades that are fixed position. I wouldn't expect to see much difference in how they will work with surface rock. The box blade will carry the fines a little further than a landplane but not by much. The landplane will be alot easier to use and will really help average out the road surface. At the risk of sounding arrogant I am pretty good with both a boxblade and a landplane and use both in my work. For the occasional user without alot of experience the landplane is the way to go.

I might also recommend you get a good rearblade for ditching and crowning the roads. This will allow you to pull material from the ditch and add it to the roadway resulting in the roadbed being higher than the ditch. This means you can roll some rock to the sides while still having enough material left for the road.

About the tightly packed large rock I recommend you leave it in place and build up over it. Digging it up can make an even worse problem. A fel that can gather up some fines and spread them over the worst areas would be a better solution.