Grading--what am I doing to cause this?

[swreeder]

You can see what I am dealing with here and I have a couple hundred feet of elevation change on my driveway

 

[ededic]

I grade a few miles of gravel road. Lots of hills, valleys and flats.

For me it comes down to a few things and all were previously mentioned.

Crown
I need to help my community understand crown in the road and why we need it. We have many that want to manage the roads from the keyboard and arm chair. I created this graphic often used to help them understand runoff with a crown. I spent meany years not maintaining the crown and using a landscape rake to grade the road and hiring a large grader to do a fall and spring grading. In the past few years I have spend much more time rebuilding the crown and the large grader is not required.

Weight
Weight of my tractor is paramount to getting a good finish. My Tractor is a 2005 JD 2210 which is 24hp, dry weight - tractor only is 1,400lbs beyond that I have loaded rear tires and a curtis cab. I have and often use the JD 210 loader with the Box Blade combo when I am not actively crowning the roads with the 4-way hydraulic front angle blade and box blade combo. When using the loader, I will typically load the bucket with extra road gravel from the box blade. My box blade is a Frontier BB5060 HD, it is 60" wide and the heavy duty model. You can see in the video I try to keep the BB full to keep the most amount of weight for down pressure. The weight on the loader keeps the front wheels from spinning up the hill and allows me to keep the tractor and the BB combo doing its job and not have to be managing the levers to make my way up an incline by lifting the BB to release more material.

Moisture
Moisture is key to a success. After a rain, I typically wait until the potholes are just damp, no standing water in potholes. This allows the gravel in the box blade to roll and churn. I get my best finish when the gravel is just moist, not wet, not dry. The cars driving on the finish grade in that moist form really establishes a good base you need to rebuild the potholes. There will be a little dip in each pothole even after grading and cars packing which is a good time to do another quick pass before it dries out too much. We also use brine the roads with calcium chloride 2-3 times a year. This keeps the dust down and hardens the road bed like pavement...for about a 4-6 weeks. During that time, I stay on top of potholes by filling them by hand with asphalt millings from the bucket using a shovel.

Speed
Speed of the tractor is a huge factor in how well the combo works. The BB works best when the tractor is in low gear and full throttle and steady pull. Too fast, you don't dig in, you don't roll and churn the gravel and you drag the gravel through the pothole leaving just a few rocks, no fines to pack. With the slow digging in you take all of the high sides off the hole and on the second pass you start taking the pothole down. In the higher gear the tractor does not have steady power and goes too fast to do it's important work. Most of my roads are 20' wide so it take patience and seat time to do a good job.

If all the roads were perfect after the first time to the point of requiring no maintenance, where would we get seat time?

 

[mechtheist]

Mechthiest, you don't live too far from me. What you are dealing with is a Caliche driveway and while there is some good advice on this thread, there is also some that doesn't apply.

If you have never lived in this area of Texas, it is tough to understand how hard of a material this is to work with. I've got a mile long driveway of this stuff and in 8 years I still haven't figured out the right way to work it. I have a landplane, boxblade, drag harrow, and landscaping rake. All of them do something, but there is not one thing that I have found that works well.

Problems with caliche are that it is predominantly fine materials that is a unique limestone to the area, with 20% or more mix of stones from golf ball to baseball size. It has a clay consistency when wet and dries rockhard very quickly. When wet enough to work it tends to clog up my landplane / boxblade. Scarcifers seem to pull too many large rocks to the surface and make it worse. Without scarcifers implements will "chatter" when the surface is too hard to work.

Ideally for me I hope someday to cover the entire driveway with a material that is easier to work with as a top layer, but for now I live with the challenges.

Since you are not far away from me, you can reach out directly if you ever want to stop by, see my drive and the equipment I have to work it.

Thanks for that, swreeder, I may take you up on that, I go through Wimberley routinely and have some wonderful memories of vacations there though they've gotten a bit hazy after almost 60 years. That's quite a drive to take care of. It's good to know I'm in good company in it being a challenge. I've lived a good chunk of my life in Austin and I'm very familiar with 'caliche', I almost called my drive that but I don't know how to tell the difference between what would be called limestone and caliche though I'd bet it isn't necessarily one or the other in a lot of places. I was reading Wiki on it and it describes it as something that happens to other types of soil under more arid conditions. I have a dry creek that exposes a lot of large limestone blocks upwards of 3-4 ft, and there's a lot of large rocks close to the surface and fossils aren't rare. Its layered, sedimentary rock laid down about 100+ million years ago when most of Texas was underwater. Not too far from me there are dinosaur footprints, some more a little further away at the Canyon Lake Dam spillway that had that awesome flooding incident about 20 years ago that cut about 40 feet down through mostly solid rock in a couple of weeks, there's videos easy to find on youtube about it.

I've had the tractor for over 4 years but I didn't really try all that hard with the drive. Don't know why I just decided I wanted to do a better job of it. I spent probably 5 days messing with it, trying different things, got it in pretty good shape but ended up with the damn ripples that just wouldn't go away. After all the great input I've gotten here, I understand it was almost certainly working it after it got too dry leading to the chattering. I really only get a few big potholes/mudholes that I need to deal with, do you have other kinds of issues plaguing you on that mile of drive?

 

[mechtheist]

I grade a few miles of gravel road. Lots of hills, valleys and flats.

For me it comes down to a few things and all were previously mentioned.

Crown
I need to help my community understand crown in the road and why we need it. We have many that want to manage the roads from the keyboard and arm chair. I created this graphic often used to help them understand runoff with a crown. I spent meany years not maintaining the crown and using a landscape rake to grade the road and hiring a large grader to do a fall and spring grading. In the past few years I have spend much more time rebuilding the crown and the large grader is not required.

View attachment 725881

Weight
Weight of my tractor is paramount to getting a good finish. My Tractor is a 2005 JD 2210 which is 24hp, dry weight - tractor only is 1,400lbs beyond that I have loaded rear tires and a curtis cab. I have and often use the JD 210 loader with the Box Blade combo when I am not actively crowning the roads with the 4-way hydraulic front angle blade and box blade combo. When using the loader, I will typically load the bucket with extra road gravel from the box blade. My box blade is a Frontier BB5060 HD, it is 60" wide and the heavy duty model. You can see in the video I try to keep the BB full to keep the most amount of weight for down pressure. The weight on the loader keeps the front wheels from spinning up the hill and allows me to keep the tractor and the BB combo doing its job and not have to be managing the levers to make my way up an incline by lifting the BB to release more material.

Moisture
Moisture is key to a success. After a rain, I typically wait until the potholes are just damp, no standing water in potholes. This allows the gravel in the box blade to roll and churn. I get my best finish when the gravel is just moist, not wet, not dry. The cars driving on the finish grade in that moist form really establishes a good base you need to rebuild the potholes. There will be a little dip in each pothole even after grading and cars packing which is a good time to do another quick pass before it dries out too much. We also use brine the roads with calcium chloride 2-3 times a year. This keeps the dust down and hardens the road bed like pavement...for about a 4-6 weeks. During that time, I stay on top of potholes by filling them by hand with asphalt millings from the bucket using a shovel.

View attachment 725894

Speed
Speed of the tractor is a huge factor in how well the combo works. The BB works best when the tractor is in low gear and full throttle and steady pull. Too fast, you don't dig in, you don't roll and churn the gravel and you drag the gravel through the pothole leaving just a few rocks, no fines to pack. With the slow digging in you take all of the high sides off the hole and on the second pass you start taking the pothole down. In the higher gear the tractor does not have steady power and goes too fast to do it's important work. Most of my roads are 20' wide so it take patience and seat time to do a good job.

If all the roads were perfect after the first time to the point of requiring no maintenance, where would we get seat time?

Looks like you keep your road in great shape. I'm also very impressed with how great a job you did getting the wheels spinning backwards, it's really consistent and consistently visible.

 

[ovrszd]

Mechthiest, you don't live too far from me. What you are dealing with is a Caliche driveway and while there is some good advice on this thread, there is also some that doesn't apply.

If you have never lived in this area of Texas, it is tough to understand how hard of a material this is to work with. I've got a mile long driveway of this stuff and in 8 years I still haven't figured out the right way to work it. I have a landplane, boxblade, drag harrow, and landscaping rake. All of them do something, but there is not one thing that I have found that works well.

Problems with caliche are that it is predominantly fine materials that is a unique limestone to the area, with 20% or more mix of stones from golf ball to baseball size. It has a clay consistency when wet and dries rockhard very quickly. When wet enough to work it tends to clog up my landplane / boxblade. Scarcifers seem to pull too many large rocks to the surface and make it worse. Without scarcifers implements will "chatter" when the surface is too hard to work.

Ideally for me I hope someday to cover the entire driveway with a material that is easier to work with as a top layer, but for now I live with the challenges.

Since you are not far away from me, you can reach out directly if you ever want to stop by, see my drive and the equipment I have to work it.

I'd been trying to think of that word, "caliche".

Having Missouri dirt to work with, I'd rather have the caliche. I'd also be reluctant to add surface material. Even crushed limestone. Not sure you would ever get it to stay where you needed it.

I think you guys are Blessed with very good driveway material. Evidenced by never having to buy/add material. I'm annually buying/adding crushed limestone to stay out of the dirt.

 

[ovrszd]

Crown
I need to help my community understand crown in the road and why we need it. We have many that want to manage the roads from the keyboard and arm chair. I created this graphic often used to help them understand runoff with a crown. I spent meany years not maintaining the crown and using a landscape rake to grade the road and hiring a large grader to do a fall and spring grading. In the past few years I have spend much more time rebuilding the crown and the large grader is not required.

View attachment 725881

This is how I maintain public gravel roads. Excellent visual.

To do this on a hillside the OP would be required to add culverts under the roadbed to get rid of the water he channels to the high side.

 

[mechtheist]

This is how I maintain public gravel roads. Excellent visual.

To do this on a hillside the OP would be required to add culverts under the roadbed to get rid of the water he channels to the high side.

Yeah, and the road is actually fairly flat along it's path, I'd be diverting the downhill flow of water 90 deg to channels I'd have to create a slope for, then back across the road at some point, but that's a problem, it could be a source of erosion that isn't existent as is, or put a culvert in but that would be kinda crazy. I don't think I'm going to to touch the straight section, it's almost perfect and I've done virtually nothing along that area ever. The one long puddle was new and it's because I cut into the side more than I did before. I can't remember what the hell I was thinking when I did that, it think it was to get material for the worst spot, I should have gotten it from the uphill side, all I did was create wall that blocked the water from running off, but only for a day or so at most. I still haven't decided how I'm going to fix that, the easiest solutions go against my idea of sloping across the whole road since they would involve moving material to raise that edge. I think I'll do what I mentioned before, start eating into the uphill side and moving it downhill while trying to maintain its downhill slope.

 

[Gordon Gould]

If all the roads were perfect after the first time to the point of requiring no maintenance, where would we get seat time?

 

[Big Blue Florida]

The OP has a drive way looking a lot as a friend's in New Mexico. The soil consist something called ''adobe'' & the gravel different shape & sizes.
Point here is after trying to grade it (nearly half a mile w/ turns & little dips etc) he drags a 10 ft wide chain link fence. It's about 20 ft long.
At the sharper turns he rolls up or folds the fence (still on the driveway), which makes it heavier at the contact patch.

His drive way would look just like your posted pix of the initial problem. The fence dragging is only a final stage & not the first step.

I should add, the actual fence appears to be a much heavier gage than what I've noticed most of us would use for a fence.
Result are very smooth. He will still run into the surprise rock that has a root to china.

 

[OzarkChris]

Don't have a harrow ...

Do you have an old piece of chain-link? A 4-6' piece attached by a cable to the rear with several blocks on top will do a good job.