Fixing A Horribly Graded Gravel Driveway | DigginLife21

good morning and welcome to the broadcast today we will not be returning to the bamboo removal project because it rained quite a bit on saturday and it's been cool ever since and it's raining now typical some see rain as a hindrance i see it as a blessing because rain makes everything grow it makes things erode and when you have a small business like me that is excavation grading land clearing all of that depends on the rain so be thankful for it you get up in the morning and you like today they were calling for it to be a 50 chance of snow that meant that it was going to be not so wet it's good to have a couple of jobs lined up for different kinds of equipment that means we're just going to leave the bamboo job till probably another week and we're going to focus on our driveway jobs this week which i'm sure you guys guys will be uh glad to see a little something different and say like the quarry drivers over there they're all lined up with nothing to do today that's the reason i like working for myself and and having various different types of jobs so in short this morning i got up looked out the window it's raining that does not necessarily mean that it is raining at one of my job site i called up the customer that i'm going to be going to do her driveway and i asked her i was like is it wet and raining over there said it's drizzling just a little bit but not wet meaning the ground's not just soaked that is good i'm not going to get upset because it's drizzling and rain and what's the point you can't control that it's not your fault so you just react to it you don't let your fields get to you and be like oh bummer my day's ruined you just react to it now we're going to go to the yard which we can do rain or shine the machine has to get moved we're going to load our kubota tractor with our everything attachments box blade which i love we're gonna haul it to the job and we'll assess what we can do when we get there if it started raining then we'll figure up another plan for the day if it's not raining we'll probably start hauling some material see you guys at the yard cold start been uh probably a couple of weeks since i ran this thing let the gulp glow clogs work you can always count on a kubota all right now i have to load said tractor on the trailer now that we're loaded up we've got about a 25-30 minute drive to the job site give me time to sip on some coffee enjoy the ride and think about exactly how i'm going to do this job once we get there we'll see you guys shortly we have arrived let's check this driveway out before i get unloaded and i'll go over with you what i'm going to do i always like to start from the bottom and start investigating be a driveway detective if you will working my way back uphill to find the source of the water down here obviously we've got a culvert pipe that crosses the road where it meets the street that's typical for the mountains here but the problem is on this side you can see that channel that's been cut by the water it just washes around to here because there's a lip right here that's higher than the road bed so obviously water can't get off of the road into the culvert pipe and wash the way it needs to be so it's coming on down to the main road causing problems there so let's work our way uphill now just working uphill about 15-20 feet again we have all these trenches that have been cut into the driveway by water moving down the driveway the cause of it is that the sides of this road are higher than the middle creating a v shape so of course water is going to be funneled to the middle when water is funneled to one central location it develops a mass it creates almost weight of the water and the movement of the water once that silt is stirred up in that location the water carries it away and that's what causes the removal of the material i got started in excavation in grading by fixing gravel driveways i absolutely love them and they are an excellent entry-level type of job because you can do it whether you've got an excavator i prefer to use a regular tractor with a box blade and that way we can angle that blade down and run up and down the road and shape that road into a crown instead of a concave shape that's going to carry water we want to pitch it not so much that cars will bottom out in the middle but you want it pitched enough to where water is shed to the sides as quickly as possible as bad as this driveway looks it's actually going to be really quick to fix my tractor is a 2015 kubota and it has just almost 600 hours on it so that tells you right there that it doesn't take long to fix these roads i have fixed hundreds and hundreds of gravel driveways most of the time one this length that's a couple hundred feet i can have it graded in 30 minutes to an hour just depending on the situation the material i have to work with and that's about it let's work our way on uphill and see what other problems and sources of this problem that we find you can see there are low areas that have been cut in this driveway by the water if you just follow those little they almost look like little dry creek beds if you'll just follow them up hill you will find the source of the water okay so we are getting really close to finding the main sources of this problem we're about a hundred feet from where we started at and as you can see clearly they haven't had much rain here but that's fresh mud so that tells me right there that water is collected in this area it's sitting and it's having time to soak in and that causes the ground below any gravel that you have to turn to mud and until you get it draining it's going to keep doing what it's doing and it's going to keep rutting out now we've arrived at the source of our problem what we have behind me is a grassy area and all the water that comes off of this house and off of that bank back there is collecting here and it's slowly starting to run around behind now you guys are facing back down toward the road that we started at and we can see that there's a high spot right over there that's holding this water and it's also channeling water toward the middle of the road so even if that road had been flat originally it's causing that water to start toward the middle of the road and as that water erodes the middle of the gravel road it's going to be worse and worse and worse so we're going to start from up here and we're going to cut this grade and get this driveway into shape so i just checked the weather and luckily enough the rain is over the skies are going to clear up and the sun will come out what i'm going to do is unload the tractor i'm going to unhook from the trailer and it's about an hour round trip for me to go to quarry to get our road bond and come back so i'm going to go ahead and take advantage of that take my time enjoy a ride back to the quarry get a load come back and that'll give us an extra hour of time for this area to dry out as much as it can before we start grading then we come back here to the belt and load road bomb yes you know talk to me yeah we're getting loaded and just want to give a quick shout out to taylor and jill over at ken white construction they just announced on their youtube channel and that they are gonna be parents come jean so i'm super stoked for them on that taylor there's nothing like being a daddy man you're gonna love it ttw one one on the scale with abc i think what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna go ahead and just drag this whole driveway but the main part i want you guys to see is how i cut this side down and all the way down to the bottom [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Applause] my tires on the tractor are six feet outside the outside that gives me a foot of that box place sticking out so i can stay in this dry fresh cut stuff with my tires and be able to shave this roadside back as i go this weather's just really trying to deteriorate so i'm gonna try to pick up the pace anytime you use a box blade and you're cutting in you're gonna end up with a flat side on the side of your driveway and it just doesn't really look good so what i'm gonna do is i'm going to back the tractor down here and i'm going to have the left side board of the box blade as close to this as i can that way as i cut that edge down it doesn't spread over and mess up the grate of my road's crown and what i want to do is drop one of the tires off on the low side and that way it tilts the whole tractor and i can just shave it down [Music] uh now i'm just going to track up and down and pack it with the tires [Music] [Music] now we're gonna go get the tractor and do the same thing to this side [Music] okay so the parking area is high in the middle low on the side so water's going to shed off water is going to hit this berm i've got up here run down mostly this side and any water that does go over there is going to run down the far side into the culvert over there so now let's pray to god that that road bond is not jam up in my tailgate that's gonna be a pain let's do it so that one went pretty good now we just got to haul a blue million more loads let's get to it well officially a little bit of rain snow mix moving in luckily there's pretty good little bit of gravel in the rest of this driveway so we should be able to skate on through this as you guys can see just three loads has made quite a difference let's go get number four it is sleeting pretty good right now it's a real fine little like ice pebbles not really bad but i want to get this last load for the day down before i have to call it a day so let's see here as you guys can see the second load and third lobe that i put down overlapped so i'm going to just jump on the tractor here and use the box blade to even everything out so now this section of road is smoothed out really nicely it's got really nice gradual crown to it so any moisture we get overnight tonight is going to either land and freeze on the road and if it's liquid it'll run off to the sides like it's supposed to and no longer will this driveway wash down the center now let's go up top throw that loaded road bond down and see if we can't get it graded out enough to where they've got somewhere to park tonight and then we can come back tomorrow and finish hauling in our loads of red bun what i've done is i've lined myself up in the middle of the two-car parking area and i'm going to stretch this load out a little bit thinner than the rest and that way we've got a base in the middle and then tomorrow i'll bring two more loads of road bond and since i'll have this middle already built up a little bit not so much that when i drop off each side that's gonna get the truck leaning so much that it'll turn me over but what i want to happen is each of those last two loads to connect in the middle here and then that will build the middle of the parking area up and that way all the water that lands up here or at the top top of it will run water around the parking area and nobody will ever be stepping out onto water puddles or mud as much road bond as we're going to put down i ain't gonna have number up nope ain't gonna have no mud just for any wondering mines what i did was the chains that i hook at the tailgate to adjust how much it'll open i only tighten them up by one length but i'm also gonna drive faster than the last ones i'm going to pretty much floorboard it all right friends hopefully you can see that we're high in the middle and we're gonna be able to move over about a half truck width tomorrow with one two more loads it's freezing this morning thank goodness that stuff didn't uh jam up my tailgate well shake it loose at least most of it came out huh all right so hopefully the sun's not glaring too bad i staggered how far back i came with the dump truck so as i grate this there'll be a slant to guide any water up here over this way obviously it's a little bit uneven the first thing i'm going to do is back up the center with the box blade and pull an even strip out to distribute it and then i'm going to work my way from one side to the other creating that nice crown so what [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] that's why i prefer a box plate let's go down to the bottom and see what we can do down there so this up here came out exactly the way i wanted it to they've got plenty of room plenty of crown i had some leftover material from that last load that i just decided to put down here to thicken this area up you see it's really high in the middle which is fine now what i'll do again this time is i will center the road and pull the box blade down and it's going to collect some of that crown and it's going to start moving that material to the sides but i'm not going to let it go all the way to the sides because i want a low spot on each side that on my last two passes i can drop the outside tires into that low spot and it'll tilt the tractor and then i'll be able to cut that crown now i'm just pulling the box blade out in both directions to flare the driveway out and make a smooth transition i'm thrilled with how this driveway turned out and shaping everything now all i've got to do is lock the lockers on the rear end of the dump truck so it doesn't spin too easy and i'm just going to go from far right far left far left far right packing this in with the weight of the truck this mixture is locking in really well so i'm confident this driveway is going to hold up for a long long time thank you guys for joining me on this video hopefully you're having a great day i know i am don't forget to hit subscribe and like the video see you guys next time you

Channel: DigginLife21

Views: 592,426

Keywords: Fixing A Horribly Graded Gravel Driveway, grading gravel driveway, gravel driveway installation, building gravel road, grading a gravel road, gravel driveway maintenance, gravel driveway repair, gravel road construction, gravel road repair, how to build gravel road, driveway build, driveway construction, building a road, cutting in roads, gravel road repair with box blade, gravel road repair with excavator, How to grade with an excavator

Id: rsJTkw1n_VE

Length: 31min 3sec (1863 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 12 2020