We have about 1 mile of gravel roads at our terminal and I could use some tips on maintaining them. The roads had tons of pot holes and the previous operators took the crown out out of the road and shoved the gravel in the ditch. We have a Case dozer on rent for some import I'm placing. I didn't have any trucks today so I was told to fix the road. I cornered the gravel out of the ditch to put the crown back in the road and got tons of grass too. I though I could mix the grass and gravel enough to lose it in the road way like the maintainers do. It didn't work so hot there was just too much, but I already had clumps of grass all over the place and couldn't get rid of it without pulling off the gravel off the road too. So my smooth road wasn't so smooth it was better then before but not by much. I figured after a day or two the grass will be dry and all the lose gravel will be compacted some so I can make a few passes and smooth the road back up. There has got to be a better way or am I just asking to much to do this with a dozer without spending a full day on it. So what do you blade hands do to get rid of all the grass? Thanks
I would think you need to be a catskinner with many years of experience to grade a road perfectly with a dozer. The road to the local landfill is about a mile long and it can get horrible for pot holes and wash board. The grader operator that does the grading has done everything can to the road it still gets pot holes 2 weeks later. The grader has wheel wobblies so it gets compacted some. They brought in tons of new road base regraded it. If you got heavy trucks running on it nothing you can do about the pot holes. With the landfill road now they just take a backhoe with some gravel spread it and back blade it. I don't think you want grass mixed in the road the brown dirt and grass will hinder the compaction. Good Luck
It was smooth until I started messing with the grass pushing the clumps just put drag marks in the lose gravel. Now it has started to rain and the water is sitting in the drag marks if it don't stop soon I'll have a real mess. I guess I wasn't thinking. I should of just windrowed the grass off the road, but I didn't want to shove the extra gravel with. Really they just need more gravel, but that would take away from the bosses quarterly bonus...
when we build roads we use 4 to 6 inch crushed concrete as a base then we spread 21aa about 6 about six inches deep and crown the hell out of it. we have a small grader we run maybe once a week through the pit this martrial mix holds up to a wide range of trucks and equipment, from gravel trains to 40 ton articulated haulers to loaders as large as cat 988.
There was no harm in trying to get the gravel that has been graded into the ditch back out. A person can only do so much using a dozer it doesn't have the capabilities of a grader.
First of all you did well to bring the material up and put a crown in the road with a dozer. It's to bad you never had a compactor to go over it once you finished. The difference with the grader is that you can keep taking the material back and forth mixing as you go. Still though, a lot of the sods won't ravel out and you have to leave them in a windrow along the side until they dry out some. Once they have set for a few days, work them back and forth again and most of it will shake out and blend in. Hummm..potholes. The secret to getting rid of potholes is 1. Have and maintain a good crown on your road. 2. Cut the potholes out, the deep ones use the ripper. Just filling them in with gravel will last no time and you will be at it again. Even with the heavy haul roads ,if you can grade it good and get a good crown, treat it with calcium chloride and it will be maintenance free.
I had to deal with this same problem at the sand pit, bout a mile and a half of sandy/muddy/rocky/etc road. First few days were not too bad, just me with one truck on it, but after we had almost a week of rain, and the bosses told me to con't hauling sand it went to pot. Potholes, ruts, washboards etc. all I could do was backdrag it. When it finally did get dry i could spend a lil more time actually grading it, but lack of new material and of course the bosses wanting me out of there(no need to finish, all that does is cost us money), did not allow me to get it to my standards, it is smooth but hilly but no potholes, won't drain the best as its lower than both sides in many spots, thanks to many years of waste sand and berms along the road(i'm on the backwaters of the Mississippi River). I guess its good as I could get it with the time and material i had so I am not going to worry bout it too much. Jason see how loose this stuff is
Clumps of grass are a pain no matter what you are doing or what equipment you are using. If you can windrow them and let them dry, then track roll them to break them up, you may be able to get them fine enough that they will blend in with the gravel, filling in the gaps and keeping the gravel from moving and thus preventing potholes. Usually rock dust is used for this but fine dirt will also work. You just need to make several passes to work it into the gravel. It takes some skill to do it with a dozer, but reading your posts for some time now, I have the feeling you have the knack for it. Good luck.
That's good advice above from Grader4me above. I started working for a county less than a year ago (my first gov't job, I might add!) and inherited a quarter of the gravel roads to maintain. The previous cab occupant had let grass grow between the ditches and the road running surface. Last fall, I started pulling in all that heavy sod and mixing into the rock what I couldn't drag off... hoping it would fall apart and break down. It finally did, but it took a couple of months at least before I wasn't leaving "comets" behind. I tend to be a little heavy on the crown, maybe 4 to 6% or so. It seems to work fairly well. Drainage is everything- anywhere two raindrops sit together on the road, a pothole begins to splash out.
Thanks guys you've been a big help. We should have at least 3"-5" of rain be the time this blows by and this road is well traveled, so I'm going to have my work cut out of me. I just feel sorry for the truck drivers if I can't get the road done before we start trucking.
You also can't have so much of a crown that when a truck drives on the road the steering of the truck is affected. If its a 10 foot wide single track road even have it pitch to one side gives enough run off. If its a double track road then you will need to crown it. Last solution pave the road no worries about pot holes again :drinkup
This story includes Caterpillar's basic road-maintaining recommendations. Focuses on grader operating techniques, but I think the road-maintaining steps might be pertinent regardless of machine doing the work. http://www.constructionequipment.com/article/CA6412864.html?q=heroes+grader Regards, L
You really have to have something decent for a sub-base to have any kind of road, Dozerboy. Mixing sod and grass into the equasion isn't really going to help your efforts much, really kinda need some crushed gravel of some quality with binding integrity. 6"-8" of something good will make a decent base, especially out in your neck 'o the woods. The grassy stuff is going to make you :Banghead when it gets to raining on it... You shouldn't have any trouble getting a crown in it with your dozer; I do it all the time. Just did my own here with a D-5N recently, and it rained unmercifully right after I got done crowning it, and the water did just what I wanted it to do, which was stay on the sides where it belongs. Good Luck.
Excellent information CEwriter. Explains proper procedures with diagrams. In the diagram "refreshing a road" the last frame shows what a proper crown is supposed to look like. I have noticed that a lot of grader operators have a hard time to make a crown look like that. Time and time again I have watched and seen exactly what they were doing wrong. They would make the cuts and move the material to start the crown but end up cutting the crown out of it. Make sense? let me explain.. In the diagram notice the "peak" in the center. In order to acheive that peak... When your drifting your material to the center of the road and you have your 3% the next pass is the big one. Now you have to bring your windrow down across the other side of the road. Don't have that windrow in the center of your moldboard because you are going to end up wondering what happened to your crown. Position your grader so that (taking the material from right to left) the right front tire is just on the outside of the windrow. Angle your blade and adjust the blade slide so that the toe is just even with the outside of the front tire. Position the blade into the windrow and move the material. This way all that you are moving is the windrow itself, and not cutting the area to the right of the windrow. Repeat this coming from the opposite side and you will get the proper crown with peak. There, that's my tip of the day. Everyone has there own way of doing things, but I know this works for me
The road is mostly done I a have a few spurs that are real mud holes to fix yet. I windrowed most of the grass off it was a lot easier today. There are a few places that the ditches are just to low to get a good crown on the road but its better then its ever been. The sub that I was doing the import for got in my face today, so I told my super we where going to have problems. He said then they can bring there own iron and hands in and do it them selfs if he wants to try and boss someone around. I'm kind of disappointed that I'm not doing the import, but it would of been a headache by myself with that little dozer and dealing with the sub. Back to pushing coke. ointhead
Read The Slope. Hi, Folks. How many of you who read the road maintenance for graders that CEWriter posted above went on to read this little piece found at the 'Read The Slope' link within that article? I am posting that piece as a .jpg file so that you can download it for yourselves for future reference. The article itself can be found here: http://www.constructionequipment.com/article/CA6377204.html The "Read The Slope' article is in the side panel down the right side of the main article. If you click on the picture in that small article, you will be taken to a larger picture. Hope this helps.
8.3% slope, that imaginary slope looked flatter than a 8:1,how do you change the % to :1
In the illustration above, that carpenter's level must be 12' long, if the tape measure is reading 12", so apparently it's not drawn to scale. Percent of slope is how many feet of rise/fall you have in 100 feet of run. So, you'd divide by 100. 100 feet of rise in 100 feet of run would be a 100% slope. It would also be a 1:1 slope. For the 8.3% slope given above, that would mean you'd have 8.3 feet of rise for every 100 feet of run, or, .083 feet of rise for every 1 foot of run, which would be .083:1 On edit: I found the "read the slope" sidebar you mention in an article about manlifts; not the road maintaining article CE writer linked to. (The information is still valid, of course.)
THAT Link. Hi, Digger242J. We are on the same page here. That link did lead to a post about manlifts and the information is just as relevant wherever it is posted. There is another thread on here somewhere in which I posted a sketch of a design for a slope meter that was adjustable to measure a wide range of slopes and the whole thing cost me about $16.00 to make and 2 hours of time. Here is the link: There are some further details about the construction of this jigger at other places in that same thread. Hope this helps.
The easiest way ive found to maintain a road with crown using a dozer is GPS. Kind of cheating but its fun cutting grade in 2nd gear:usa
Based on the title of this thread, my contribution will be posting a link SD LTAP Gravel Road Maintenance Manual . As a newbie, I found it an interesting read.