box blade wet pot hole advice

[lol64]

First of all a big thank you to the forum for all the info on here! I'm in the UK with a long compacted stone track to maintain and box blades are relatively unheard of over here. Most people you ask flat out advise you that they wouldn't be strong / heavy enough to loosen heavily compacted stone and the only way to do the job properly is with heavy machinery. Well, I am glad that I ignored that advice and followed the advice on TBN. I found a company that makes box blades in England (Oxdale) and bought a 72 inch one, delivered yesterday. A few hours of work today and I was pretty impressed at the results on a long heavily pot holed stretch, no pot holes now and nice and smooth & level! I'm glad I learned the basics on this forum, I followed the advice and it came out good!

My small contribution to all the knowledge here... brush the water out of those pot holes before starting. We had rain yesterday, dry today, so conditions were pretty ideal. With hindsight of course it's obvious that you need to remove the standing water, but I just left it and so now those "wet patches" that used to be the deeper pot holes are now soft after I compacted the track. You live and learn and I won't make that mistake again.

 

[PHPaul]

It's been my experience (working with gravel) that just filling the potholes by grading materiel into them is only a temporary solution. As vehicles travel over the area, the uncompacted fill in the pothole is basically splattered back out of the hole and it just reappears in a matter of days or weeks depending on traffic.

A better solution is to use the scarifier teeth to rip the entire surface loose and then re-grade. That way, everything has a chance for traffic to re-compact it evenly.

But, as you've found, grading provides immediate results and you can always just get in the habit of grading the drive on a regular basis.

Also, at the risk of repeating what you already know, "level" is not the ideal situation. A little crown in the middle will help water run off. Standing water is what creates potholes to begin with.

 

[lol64]

It's been my experience (working with gravel) that just filling the potholes by grading materiel into them is only a temporary solution. As vehicles travel over the area, the uncompacted fill in the pothole is basically splattered back out of the hole and it just reappears in a matter of days or weeks depending on traffic.

A better solution is to use the scarifier teeth to rip the entire surface loose and then re-grade. That way, everything has a chance for traffic to re-compact it evenly.

But, as you've found, grading provides immediate results and you can always just get in the habit of grading the drive on a regular basis.

Also, at the risk of repeating what you already know, "level" is not the ideal situation. A little crown in the middle will help water run off. Standing water is what creates potholes to begin with.

Thanks for that, but in fact I did rip the surface first and it worked perfectly. The wet patches haven't sunk with traffic on them, so I've got away with that. I'll still brush away standing water next time though.

Creating a camber is for my next attempt!

 

[PHPaul]

Ah. Good. Box blades are amazing, aren't they?

It being Spring in Maine, I'm getting quite a bit of work repairing gravel driveways. Snow plows and frost damage from the Winter plus Spring rains tends to create a lot of ruts and potholes.

Most folks call me and say "If I have some gravel delivered, can you spread it out for me?"

My reply is "Let me cut the top off and regrade what you have and then we'll see if we actually need more gravel."

Many times we don't need any after I've reclaimed what got pushed off to the sides, and even when we do need some it's usually a fraction of what they estimated.

 

[JRobyn]

I get the best results by keeping a few piles of relatively coarse gravel about the place and filling any actual holes first with that. Then a week or two of driving on that to compact well, and THEN finishing and smoothing with the box blade. Yeah, I know, more manual labor.

It actually works best if the holes are still wet. Easy to identify low spots that way, and the fresh gravel embeds well into the existing road base.

What works REALLY well is for me to drive the tractor and fill the FEL bucket with the gravel, and then bring it to my "ground man" (wife) with a shovel and 4-tine rake. I slowly back up at her direction to place the bucket right over the problem. So it takes the minimum labor for her to fill and feather each hole. We can cover our 1/2 mile road with dozens of holes in a few hours.

 

[sdef]

I get the best results by keeping a few piles of relatively coarse gravel about the place and filling any actual holes first with that. Then a week or two of driving on that to compact well, and THEN finishing and smoothing with the box blade. Yeah, I know, more manual labor.

It actually works best if the holes are still wet. Easy to identify low spots that way, and the fresh gravel embeds well into the existing road base.

+1 I never worry about low spots holding water as I do a repair as the water helps to keep the immediate area soft so I can add larger/coarser material and then pound/push it into the ground. The soft areas will always be soft until fortified with coarse material, in my experience.

My driveway had a lot of soft spots due to me removing trees and large rocks while clearing my forested property and back filling the holes. Some spots were as large as an automobile and a few feet (1 meter ) deep. I placed a finish layer of slag over the top and allowed all of the construction vehicles- dump trucks, etc. to finish packing it for me and identify more spots that needed tending after construction was completed.

The only long-term fix for me is to fill the soft areas with large rocks (from my very rocky property) and then top them off with soil or small rocks while the soil was wet, which allowed me to pack the rocks firmly into the soft ground by driving over them with the 7000# tractor. I do the same now on a smaller scale with the few remaining small spots, similar to your situation I imagine.

I have a side opening garage on the new house and a 30' x 60' concrete pad on that end of the house. I also removed more trees ~ 15' wide running along the length of the concrete driveway by the house to use as an access point for the tractor, truck, trailers, dump trucks, etc. It was a muddy mess and I filled the soft spots (most of the area) with larger rocks and used the tractor and 500# landscape rake and 710# box blade to pack and smooth. After it dried out a little bit I had a 22 ton dump truck load of 3" crushed concrete brought in that I covered the muddy area with. The same dump truck came out a few weeks later with 22.5 tons of sand/clay and drove over the top of this new gravel access area to the rear of the property, to dump the load for leveling out the area I will build my shop. He was impressed with how well this new area had firmed up and supported his dump truck. Not a single depression left by his dump truck in the previously, extremely soft area.

So in the end, water is your friend in some many ways when fixing holes.

 

[JRobyn]

My theory is that *most* pot holes, at least the ones in our road-through-the-woods are caused by some old organic matter, mostly tree stumps and roots, that are slowly decaying under the surface.

 

[sandman2234]

If you liked the box blade, you will be ecstatic with the results from a dura-grader style of pull behind land-plane.
David from jax

 

[sdef]

If you liked the box blade, you will be ecstatic with the results from a dura-grader style of pull behind land-plane.
David from jax

Yep. A farmer friend has a 48" unit he stumbled across really inexpensively from an owner who had no clue what it was... He uses it on his private road that is ~ 1/3 mile long and he loves it. Even as small as it is behind his Ford tractor.

 

[skyhook]

Dig the hole out about 6 inches with a backhoe bucket making it "square" l__l , then fill it in. Less chance of the stone coming out that way.