Eddie, I have to disagree with your advise on this. I am no expert but I had no trouble at all using a boxblade for my driveway. I am able to move excess material from one area to another and end up with a driveway that even my wife complements.
While I have no doubt that most everyone here can "maintain" a gravel driveway with a box blade, there will be a time when things will change.
You have to start out with a well graded road. If it's all messed up from the beginning, it's extremely difficult to get is smooth with a box blade. It's doable with time and practice, it's also very frustrating and time consuming.
One of the biggest and most common mistakes that I see on here is people who are grading an existing gravel driveway to smooth it out. While this will give you instant improvement on your gravel road, it is also speeding up the process of that road failing. The rock needs to be a minimum thickness. Here in my area, that's 4 inches. In other areas it might also be four inches, but I think that some areas it might need to be more then that.
When you grade a gravel road, you are moving rock from one place to another. This is pretty obvious, but the long term effect is that the place you are taking the rock from is now thinner and the place that you are adding it to has already failed, so it's doubtful that you've built it up to the proper thickness. Now you have two areas that will fail instead of the one.
Do this over and over again on a long gravel road, and you have done more damage then good. When you have a low area, then you need to "BUY MORE" rock and work it into the low area. This means breaking it up and re-compacting it for a tight fit.
Just look at the sides of your road a week or two after box blading it and see if there's any rock there? I've seen the ditches along gravel drives that were so full of rock that you couldn't see the dirt under the rock. Of course that driveway was a disaster and nobody understood why the rock wouldn't stay on the road.
Eddie
