I have some questions for you guys that prefer your FEL to a box blade. What type of grading are you doing with your FEL? What do you do when you need one side lower than the other?
First, I'm don't have anything against the box blade. I think it's a good, all around tool that does allot of things. In the right hands, it's proven to be an amazing tool that is capable of grading the ground as good as anything out there. While I'm not capable of this, and I've tried, I've seen others who are. Rob is a master with a box blade. His roads are as good as any you will ever see that are maintained with a Motor Grader. He has a skill that I do not.
Recognizing early on that it would either take more hours then I wanted to master the box blade, or figure out another method, I started looking around at other options. While watching some road construction going on in town, I saw how they used the loader to spread and smooth out material. Those guys who do this for a living are just amazing at how quickly they can do this. Once I saw it in action, I couldn't wait to do it myself.
I just push the bucket down flat on the ground and get the tires into the air. This gives me my maximum wieght on the bucket. Then I put the tractor in reverse and adjust the angle of the bucket. I can angle it so that I'm digging down to take off a high spot, or angle it up to fill a low spot. The shape and design of the bucket makes it easy for me to tell when it's flat and level, so that makes it really simple to make the ground flat and level.
Even though I have a dozer with an angle/tilt blade for finish work, I have found that I am better at finishing off a grade with the FEL bucket then I am with the dozer blade. When spreading the gravel for my driveway, I never even started the dozer.
One thing that I've read over and over again is that allot of guys use their box blade to smooth out their gravel roads and driveways. Gravel is a simple thing with just a few rules that you have to remember. One of those rules is that it needs to be at least 4 inches thick to keep itself together. If it gets thinner then that, it will start to fall apart and you end up with pot holes. From what I've seen, the most common reason for this is constantly scraping the gravel around to fill in low spots. All this does is remove the gravel from the good areas and put it on the bad areas. This doesn't actually fix the bad area, but instead, creates more bad areas.
I never scrape existing gravel. If it's left alone, it will last a very long time. once broken up, it needs to be compacted to a thickness of at least 4 inches. To fill in a low spot or pothole, you have to break up the gravel in the pothole and add gravel to that spot. Then smooth it out and compact it all together. The boxblade would be good for this if done properly, but that would require using the teeth to break up the gravel in the pothole and then spreading the new gravel over the low area. I can do all of this with my FEL allot faster and easier.
For those of you who don't have to buy gravel to put on top of your dirt, and live where your soil is naturally rocky, then the box blade is just fine for maintaining your roads. The problems happen from thinning down the rock that you buy and add to your soil.
Of course, if you don't start out with enough rock, or good drainage, then it really doesn't matter what you use on your road, it's not going to last very long anyway.
Eddie
