We’re going to talk about gravel road repair maintenance, construction and just some basic simple practices to follow when your contractor myself, is going to build or reshape or resurface your gravel driveway or private road.
Best Practices for Gravel Road Repair and Maintenance
Even when it’s prepping for pavement, for example, you want, the most critical part, is you want a crown.
So a crown, let’s say you have a 12 foot, 14 foot wide driveway, you want to have both sides of the driveway to be lower than the center of the driveway. So you want it to be a peak in the center of the driveway so that not only do you fall water down the slope of the driveway but you want to fall water to the sides of the driveway, that keeps driveway from becoming basically a trough in carrying water.
A little crown on the driveway, built up this yard to the left. Did pretty, pretty good.
So if there is no fall and it’s a perfectly flat surface, you can just make that peak a little bit higher, so that you are flowing water off the side of the driveway. It’s really important. On some of these driveways you can see in the pictures and in the video here that we’re back and forth on and you can see that crown and sometimes it’s tough to see because the lighting and everything, but it is there. And generally, you want like about an inch and a half, two inches a crown to the center. The center of the of the road is going to be two inches higher roughly, then both sides. And that’s just going to keep water off of it and you’ve got water on top of the gravel driveway. What happens is it just makes like a squishy sponge, for example. And that’s what really splats out the mud and creates a pot hole, that’s going to help out, holes are created.
If you’ve been on gravel roads before, for example, that have a really high crown and you’ll often notice that, they’re pretty smooth in there and pretty good shape and it’s because of that crown. So the water washes off the road going to stay in there and make for a squishy problem.
How to Fix a Pothole and Best Practices
So the second part about gravel driveway and private road maintenance for example, there’s a lot of people who will think that just filling in the pot hole solve the problem. In the truth of the matter is that filling in the pot hole, it’s a temporary effect, it’s a bandage, it’s a patch. It’s not the proper way however, to really fix a pot hole.
So a pothole is a really hard bottom surface because all the fine particles have gathered at the bottom of that pothole, it’s almost like a mini concrete ball for example.
In that fills with water and every time you drive a car through that, it splashes out the water and splashes out some of the material in that pothole will actually get deeper. So part of the problem is the pothole is there because the crown, the grade on the driveway on the road wasn’t done correctly, there was a low spot there and the water was gathering there.
Now, this is isn’t… I mean, this is broad spectrum, so every driveways is a little bit different. But what you want to do or if you go ahead and fill that with dirt, gravel or whatever you have, what’s going to happen is that, that area is still going to collect water and it will become a smooshy sponge again and you’ll drive over it, in that gravel, that pothole will actually just become bigger. So really just filling it in is improper way to fix the pothole.
So you can do it with the box blade which is the blade or a drag behind the tractor, a lot of home owners and stuff, who have tractors, who have that equipment, go ahead and do that. And that’s a really reasonable, pretty good decent fix to use. You can do that, if you are your own tractor and or a drag or something, that’s a good way just to keep it maintain and your driveway will stay in pretty good shape. However, for those of you who don’t have that type of equipment on hand, one of the best thing to do when looking for a contractor, is really I like to use the Harley Rake.
So you’ll see in the video here, the Harley Rake and what that is, it’s somewhat like of a roto tiller and somewhat of a box blade but it’s a really… I love that tool, it’s probably one of my most favorite attachments tools in the whole toolbox of excavating equipment because what it does it really tills up and mixes in, re-mixes the gravel into what would be a brand new gravel. And a lot of times you can avoid bringing in new gravel material, hauling in, trucking in, so you’re going to save the cost of tracking and the material in order to repair or fix your driveway. Did that a couple of times last year for people.
You’re not always going to save on trucking sometimes there’s just so much material that’s been washed away over the years that you really do need to bring in material to build up the crown or make additions to the driveway. So harley raking can do great way to go because it mechanically tilts up, breaks up the bottom of those potholes and basically the bottom of what you could somewhat consider to be a concrete little bowl at the bottom there. But fantastic way, you push that material on the center of the road to recreate the crown and they are great utility tool to repair and remake gravel driveways.
So hope this helps for you guys, appreciate you watching. If you found this helpful, insightful leave a comment below, tell me what you think. Subscribe to the channel, if you haven’t already subscribed and appreciate you guys for watching. Take care. Thanks. Bye.