How to Properly Grade Gravel Drive with a Box Blade

well good morning welcome back to the farm today's project is finishing grading our gravel driveway we've got about a thousand foot driveway and i like to get it graded up a little bit before the fall and the winter when when it often starts to get washed out and you can see we've got a fairly steep hill here which makes it a little bit difficult if it's not properly done a number of years years ago i paid someone quite a lot to actually come in and do a bunch of work on the road um and add some gravel and quite frankly a lot of it just washed out and so i decided to be best if i uh just did it myself i bought a bit of equipment that you need and learned a little bit about it um it's pretty easy and uh since i've done that i haven't really had any problems so i'll take you through today talk to you a little bit about the equipment and how i set up not not to say the only way but at least the way that i do it it may be a little bit hard to see but this is sort of what i'm trying to do when i do the grading you can see that the driveway has actually got a high point in the middle and then flows off gradually to both sides into a ditch on either side and that's really what you need to prevent washouts if the road is flat it's not going to do much for you the water will just pool and give you potholes and wash outs if it's too steep you can slide off the edge and so there's sort of a fine line between just getting this gives you a sense of the gravel i use it's called three inch crusher run so you can see it's a bit of a mix you've got some large pieces uh you know not large but sort of mid-size pieces like this uh but then it's also mixed in with all of the fines it's pretty hard because it's been broken up but you can see some of the smaller stuff that's in there as well and when it's uh properly uh spread and then rained on a little bit it actually gets quite salt just as a point of comparison this is you can see basically washed gravel and while it looks really nice uh it's super slippery like if you're driving on this it's not really uh sticking together uh it can actually wash out fairly easily so this is the equipment that i use to uh to grade the driveway and quite frankly i've really only tried two pieces of equipment i've tried a bar a straight blade or a back blade uh which is okay and we'll sort of do in a pinch but i find that this box blade is is far better and you can get ones that are uh much more you know higher quality than this one in terms of having hydraulic adjustments for the for the various things but but i find this is super helpful and a couple of key parts to this uh it's got these deep scarifiers uh right here which are used there's a bit of flexibility in them and you can adjust the height manually in terms of how deep you want to go and this is what's used to really break up the gravel and the drive uh knock down things like the potholes uh and and allow you to actually do the do the grading and then at the back and these things by the way they need to be replaced i had one of these break off so make sure that your dealer can get you new ones if if you need to then at the back there's a blade uh here which is used to to actually do the scraping and that's removable and replaceable as well and then finally there's the heavy duty uh box construction which is all of this and effectively that's what holds the gravel so as you are moving forward you're collecting gravel from the high spots it's it's effectively storing the gravel in this blade uh in the box at least and then as you get to low spots it spreads it out evenly uh using the blade i mentioned the critical thing is making sure that you've got the right grade set uh you know the angle basically for uh for your drive to help with runoff and this is what i tend to do you can see here by looking at the level that the blade is currently flat which is fine for things like parking areas but i really want it to be twisted down like this so this effectively this end would be the high point the middle of the road because i would i and then this would be the uh the low point so i need to extend uh the you know the leveling so the loader arms at the bottom are what sets the depth and then i can adjust the the length of the of the link here to basically push it out and drop down drop down that edge the third adjustment you can use is to adjust the length of the top link this thing here to effectively tilt the entire uh box forward or back so the more forward it's tilted like this makes this blade dig in more aggressively i tend to leave it relatively neutral so almost flat but then maybe pitched forward a little bit to give it a bit of a bite and part of this really depends on when you do the grating i find the best time to actually get at this is a couple of days after a light rain when you're not sort of trying to break up gravel that feels like okay so we're ready to get started uh i often think about it as three different phases the first one is you need to box plate the entire drive to get rid of the to break it up a little bit and get rid of all the weeds so i've done that second is use your loader or have the gravel truck help you spread out a layer of gravel this is about you know a couple of inches in this whole area so get that all spread out a little bit and then the third part which we're going to do right now is using the box blade to blend it in and to actually do the grading i typically run the tractor around 1500 rpm for this you don't need a ton of power but uh a little bit of extra power helps uh i run it as you can see down here in medium you don't need low and highs probably too fast and then the third setting is your lift arm height down here and uh you can basically figure out what the right adjustment is based on that and then uh lock in your your height adjustment well as you can see i finished the grating it's not perfect but it's actually pretty good leveled out a lot of the bigger spots and blended into gravel so hopefully that's helpful to you thanks for watching

Channel: Chescott Farm

Views: 127,492

Keywords: boxblade gravel, box blade gravel, maintain gravel road, maintain gravel drive, remove potholes, fix potholes, prevent washouts, hobby farm, box blade gravel drive, boxblade gravel road, chescott farm, how to box blade, how to adjust box blade, back blade gravel, How to Properly Grade Gravel Drive with a Box Blade, kubota mx5100, box blade with tractor, box blade tips, box blade attachment, box blade for tractors, box blades driveway

Id: MoHJNCDtuHQ

Length: 6min 51sec (411 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 09 2020