As an inexperienced landowner/operator in a remote location, would an experienced operator please help me understand how to flatten / level / smooth our driveway, which I can only describe as "humpy"? I have a Kubota SVL75-2 compact track loader and a 1958 Ford 961 Powermaster tractor (which I love, but I am considering selling it to simplify our setup). As for attachments, I have the usual 74" smooth bucket and just acquired a Jenkins Soil Conditioner (power rake), with the intent of using it on our roads as well as to level/grade orchard space and prep lawn/clover planting. The driveway is 2-minus gravel, and it has become humpy over the years just from my efforts to resurface and fill low points over the years. It has a few different grades, a turn, and a number of culverts for drainage. Due to my inexperience, I probably made the humps worse by dumping material, back dragging, and floating the bucket in attempts to get a smooth road. I don't have an intuitive sense to keep the bucket angle inline with the natural road grade, so I'm usually either riding the humps, or digging in too far. So I end up feeling pretty good about my work each time I work on the driveway, until we drive on it for the first time and feel like we're on a humpy slide at the park, up, down, up, down... Is experience (doing this hundreds more times) the only thing that will clear the humps? Am I just fighting with using the wrong tool, and should be using the back blade on the tractor, meaning I shouldn't sell it? Or will only a grader with its long wheelbase clear the humps? Thanks for any advice! Patrick
Gravel roads take proper maintenance. Proper maintenance takes experience. After nearly 5 years of maintaining our ranch roads, I am just now feeling like I know what I am doing. The CTL is a great tool for road work and the power rake will probably be a huge value to you as you get experience with it. I've never used one, but watched a guy do the final grade on our house with one and it looks like it would be excellent. All that being said, I'd take a tractor over a CTL for road maintenance. If your humps aren't too bad, wait a few days after a good rain when the soils aren't quite fully dry, but won't clump together and run a box blade over your road. A box blade is used for carrying materials from the high spots to the low spots. The angle blade is used to bring gravel from one side of the road to the other, as in a curve in the road where traffic tends to push gravel to the outside. Don't bother with trying to fill in potholes, they will come right back after the next rain. Instead, drop your scarifers on the box blade or teeth on a CTL bucket and rip that area up and regrade it. The biggest rule for roads is get the water off the road as soon as possible. Put on a rain jacket and look at your roads during a downpour to see where the water is going. Over time, roads develop "secondary ditches" as material is moved around and ditches fill in with sediment. I have found this book to be very helpful (and free) when I needed to better understand some particular part of road building/maintaining. http://www.pacificwatershed.com/sites/default/files/roadsenglishbookapril2015b_0.pdf
awesome, thanks @JBrady ! Experience it is. I am sure I am over-thinking this, but the issue I have is that the tractor/CTL is riding the humps as it's trying to level, so my feeling is even if I had a box blade, if the equipment it's attached to is angling up and down with the humps, the blade would just replicate the same humps, maybe with an offset. Whereas an actual grader has such a long wheelbase that its angle would always be gentle enough to result in a smoothing of humps. That's why I wonder if I simply had the experience to modulate bucket angle, I could cut down the humps once and for all and be done with it. I am sure I am over-thinking!
It's your back blade and your inexperience ... I know since for years, I put more humps and dips than I took out using the neighbors back blade. I would spend hours back and forth. Then reversing the blade and trying to drag it smooth. Hours I say !! Then I got a land plane behind the tractor. Now it's once out and once back to maintain the road. Maybe twice if I've neglected it for a long time. I did have to mark the low spots when it rained at first. Then I used the land plane to carry the minimal amount of gravel to level them. there are several manufacturers. this is what I got ... https://www.roadboss.org/ If you were determined to use your CTL.. adding a laser level set-up would surely help.. Ask CM1995 here
One suggestion with the CTL is start the project with the machine sitting on flat ground. Then work your way down the driveway. If the machine is sitting on flat ground you shouldnt have an issue with the machine tetor totering over uneven ground, throwing off your grading.
OK so it sounds like I will be fine selling the tractor (again I love it, but have kept it more for emotional reasons and need the storage space for other tools). I just need to get more experience grading with the bucket. @KSSS if you can picture a beginner working down the driveway, it's "on grade" at first, but with the first dip the CTL is already off grade, then climbing back out ever so slightly with the next hump. So the teeter-tottering isn't so pronounced, but it's enough that after the first dip/hump I lose a sense of what is on grade. That is, between dips, humps, and normal changes in grade (and direction along the road ... not to mention slight variations in crown, adding yet another angle/dimension), I lose a reference of what is "flat". If we're confirming I should eventually get the hang of this with the CTL and bucket OR power rake then I will feel OK parting with the tractor.
Washboards on dirt roads are the same as potholes, the only way to get rid of them is to rip up, re-grade and compact. The loose material drug back over established washboards or potholes only works it's way out with tire traffic resulting in the same problem over and over again. A tooth bucket on a CTL is a great tool for grading a dirt/gravel driveway. It's hard to scarify and dig out the potholes and washboards with a smooth bucket or a power rake, however a tooth bucket can do that in addition to providing a smooth finish grade. As others have said moisture content and material also play a big role in a smooth drive, in addition to the most important part which is water management. You want a crown or a pitch to one side on your drive no matter how narrow it is in order to get the water off as quickly as possible.
I don't have a problem with washboards. The humps are roughly 10-30' apart, just from things like imperfectly dropping and back-dragging new material -- so, for example, a dropped pile of material might have gotten dragged back 10-20ft but I stopped too soon or didn't have the right bucket angle or "bite" into the pile. So if you can imagine running over a road like that with a bucket hung from floating load arms, if you had the finesse to keep the angle of the bucket on grade the entire time, that bucket would cut down all of those humps after, let's say, 2 runs down the road. My issue is that I lose my sense of reference for the grade as it changes down the road.
I would emphatically suggest you keep the tractor, and fit it with an angling blade. Once you get the driveway you want it, the tractor can keep it tuned with ease and put a crown in it that the CTL cannot.
A skid steer is a poor tool for taking out roller coaster humps and dips in a gravel driveway. It will never automatically level like a grader will, and the feel is tough too. You can improve your results by back dragging at an angle, but who wants to do that? I've got an amazing and simple pull drag that works wonders with wet loose gravel after spring thaw, but it won't do much for hard dry gravel this time of year. Even that simple drag is an easier tool to fix driveways than a skid loader. To take the dips out, you have to either memorize the position of the humps and dips you want to fix, or mark them out before you fix them. Go out at night and set a flashlight on the ground to highlight the grade, if it's that flat. If it's curved and changing grade, then the feel when you're driving on the driveway is as good as you'll get.
You can fix up the driveway just fine with a CTL, but I don't think anything but seat time will get you there. I could clean the drive up in a couple hours, but I really have no idea how to explain how, other than to say that if the machine is real new and tight, you can work forwards a lot, otherwise on all the rest of the machines out there, I do most of the work in reverse.
Being a back drag artist won't get the humps out. I was taught that many years ago. Tooth bucket would be better for grading as it will cut instead of riding over humps. When cutting it's best to keep a mostly full bucket as this adds weight to help the bucket edge cut. It's usually best to cut extra then lay loose fill down. Your bucket needs to stay against the stops as you need to ride on the heal of the bucket to stop the wash board effect. Two inch rock mixed in will make it harder to grade. Real dry hard roads are hard to grade. When working on a road I will sometimes cut the edge and lay them in the road to try and get some of the crown back and get the water off the road. This gives loose material to help fill voids and pot holes. Once you get the machine level I keep cutting forward and always have material in front of the bucket. If you don't have material to work with you can't control the grade. I hope I haven't over simplified this but I've been running skid steers for around 44 years. Not much is hard anymore.
I had the same issue lots of humps and bumps until I installed a laser level system, now the driveway stays level.
Hire a grader to whip it back in shape then you got something to go by when you play and learn
In my area contractors quite often weld steel plates (think cutting edge) on the back of skid steer buckets to eliminate bucket wear. Back-dragging is a very efficient way to help spread material. Using the float position is a waste of time when back-dragging.
This is not a typical driveway if I remember right. A grader would be a good tool, but only if the operator is above average to see what needs to be done to smooth the grades and curves. Long term, no tool is going to make this effortless or automatic short of GPS control and mapping of a design. You're going to have to be able to stand back and look at the bumps to see where they need to go and then move them there. could be a three point blade when it's wet, or a track loader, or a grader, you'll still need to identify what to do and then do it.
GPS is great but someone good can do this easy. Changing slope is simply throwing rock right or left. Just did a rutted drive on a new house today with the rake I built, maybe 30 minutes on a 1/8 mile drive.