Road maintenance

   / Road maintenance #1  

CA Grown

New member
Joined
Dec 17, 2012
Messages
10
Location
Central California
Tractor
John Deere 6520L
I'm still trying to figure out what the best approach is to maintaining my access roads in the field. I'm going to cut them with a blade and then what?

The roads will get weeds or ruts from overhead sprinklers and I'm just wondering what the easiest approach is to keeping them flat and smoothe.

A land plane would be the best but I don't want to 'pick up' too much dirt because at the end, I'll his have a big pile of dirt to deal with after the scraping.

Would a chisel remove the weeds and flatten it out alright, then running a roller after to make it flat and compact?

I guess I just need a solution to ripping the weeds out, filling in ruts and flattening of my roads. The ruts won't be too big as I'll get on it before something that big forms.

Any ideas? Pics or links would be most helpful.
 
   / Road maintenance #2  
I just "built" a new road out thru my property. I have most all the road tools - box blade, back blade, disc plow, grading scraper. I used the grading scraper and it worked just fine. This road was scratched out of just plain old dirt - no gravel. For almost the entire distance I had to tear out the sod, grass, weed etc. There were numerous side trips to dump the large rock & sod that accumulated in the scraper. The final product is smooth, level and will pack hard as a rock because of the silt & loam mix. The box blade would have dug too much and gouged out too much dirt - the back blade would have made a rolly coaster or wash board road. This is not a road that will see lots of heavy traffic and can be easily repaired with the grading scraper. The road is approximately 500 yards long.
 
   / Road maintenance #3  
Sounds to me like you are going to use the rear blade to cut a ditch on the edges and use this removed material to build up the road way slightly. I would think having both a rearblade and a landplane to keep this smooth would be the simplest solution. With overhead sprinklers wetting the road it will need alot of maintenance on a continueing basis. How you crown the roadbed and install the ditches just depends on your individual circumstances. Most of these roads are tough to keep up without some rock for the base.
 
   / Road maintenance #4  
If you keep the grass and weeds off, and water it, you will have mud :( On my trails, I prefer to have low vegetation.

Of course water and heavy traffic (sprinklers) is going to be a difficult problem. How about spreading gravel in the areas where the sprinklers cross?
 
   / Road maintenance #5  
If you keep the grass and weeds off, and water it, you will have mud :( On my trails, I prefer to have low vegetation.

Of course water and heavy traffic (sprinklers) is going to be a difficult problem. How about spreading gravel in the areas where the sprinklers cross?




I agree with adding fravel where it is needed for wet areas, kind of hard to get around this. Time will help you decide what is needed to make it work, I suspect that if you use this much you will need to add some gravel base.
 
 
 
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