1618 gravel driveway maintenance

I have tried a blade, cultivator, landscape rake, and several homemades. The landscape rake works best to break up the gravel. The blade works best to move the gravel and shape the road. And all will work to do the final smooth. You need to add weight to the landscape rake to get it to dig in. Expect to make several passes to break up the gravel to a sufficient depth. Switch to the blade to move the gravel to the middle of the driveway and crown if desired. To smooth out the gravel, reverse the blade, or landscape rake, even drag a section of chain-link fence. Many things will work. When grading the parking area, you will cut deeper on the inside of the turn, or maybe it is the other way around. I forget. Anyway, the set of your instrument will change in a turn from the set you had when pulling straight.

Don Hayes

I have a driveway that had some really deep ruts in it

two years ago I used a cheap rototiller to chew up some of the high spots until I blew the engine (previous owner did NOT torque the con-rod bolts properly during the rebuild)

I was unmotivated last year and did nothing

this year (last weekend) I went to do more work, and the driveway was covered with weeds, I still used a walk behind tractor with a quacker point cultivator to tear up the first 3-5 inches until I was overcome with sunburn/dehydration.

i think it worked well, it looked and felt a lot flatter, but I was not able to do more. I also have a snowplow blade I was going to use to grade the surface, and then I was going to use the combo to flatten out some root balls on the edge of my lawn

next time I am up I am taking the weed sprayer and other tools to see how it looks, might have to wait for a few rainstorms to see how well it washes the dirt away from the gravel

my current investment is about half of what it would cost for a truckload of washed gravel, which I might buy anyway as I have to raise the roadbed about 6 inches, unless I find gravel in the raised shoulder (which i think I might)

Curlymurt,

I don't have a grader blade for the Power King, so I use the big tractor for that after I break up the gravel. The grader blade only turns to 30 degrees so gravel was flowing off the toe and the blade was not long enough to reach beyond the tires. I fixed that by replacing the 6 foot blade with an 8 foot blade and rigging a latch that would hold the blade approximately 45 degrees. The blade protrudes 1.5 feet beyond the frame and is far enough out I can grab material and bring it to the center of the road. The pitch is near vertical and the toe is slightly lower than the rear which helps develop a crown. To smooth the gravel, I reverse the blade, set the angle to 30 degrees, set the pitch so the edge is pointing to the rear and the blade is either level or the toe slightly lower still. It smooths better than the reversed landscape rake. I don't use the 8 foot blade for anything heavy.

For your job, if you bought or made a landscape rake, you could bolt a grader blade to the tines. And use that to move and smooth the gravel. Or you could get a grader blade and figure out how to add the scarifiers. I have seen old hand made graders using parallel 8 X 8s framed about 2 feet apart with cutter and rebar scarifiers on one side and flip it over for smoothing. It was pulled by rope or chain so you could set the angle. You could make a land-plane, but it is probably too much for the Power King.

Just some thoughts.

Don Hayes