Driveway Material

[Jeff A. Smith]

I would strongly suggest considering concrete for the sections prone to damage.

Concrete will hold up much better than asphalt as I'm sure you know but cost can be extreme. I get 235 yards of concrete for 10' wide and 4" thick. We poured 60 yards at my parents home last summer and thought that was a big job.

That is an excellent idea... combined with some small drainage culverts underneath. I had thought of the culverts, but those wash-prone areas in concrete would be money well spent. Thanks!

[Bill Conerly]

When the Romans started building roads, they figured out that drainage was the most important issue. Charles Lent is a Roman.

[Charles Lent]

No, not a Roman, but I figured out long ago to add drainage to my very long dirt and gravel driveway to keep certain areas from deteriorating quickly. After getting it drained and stable, it is now paved with asphalt. No problems at all for 9 years, but now there are two small soft areas that are showing up. This year I'll need to have those dug out and repaired.

Charley

[Larry Frank]

Interesting comments about concrete and then I look at where people are from. It is a bit different when you live in an area that get significant ground heavy and freeze going down 2-4 ft. Up north, I would grade the organics off and get down to solid ground and then put down a limestone gravel base. I would do this for a number of years and then blacktop. Up north, concrete cracks too easy unless you have a very solid base.

Of course, one should put in drainage as needed

[ernest dubois]

It seems I'm the only one having trouble understanding the drainage part. Is this as simple as crowning or adequate grading? Is it involving grates and buried piping or cut-outs or channeling? Or all of those as long as pooling gets avoided? Trying to come up with a good plan myself, not to include asphalt.

[Jim Becker]

Ernest, drainage needs are site specific and don't just involve the roadway/driveway. How ground water flows across the topology is what has to be considered to insure that the integrity of the roadway/driveway isn't compromised by erosion. The solution may involve all of the things you mention, depending on actual local circumstances. In some cases, you need to be sure that water can "cross the road" via a culvert or other means. On other thing that often needs to be addressed with residential driveways is channeling water that's flowing down the actual driveway so that it gets directed away without washing away the driveway (if gravel), the edges of the driveway or the adjacent spaces when the driveway is sloped. Most of the repairs I've had to do on my own 400' of stone driveway revolve around heavy water flow during particularly nasty storms....the volume of water picks the driveway because it's "easy". I have a plan to address that better, especially if I find a way to fund paving it.

[David Helm]

My driveway, which is about 300 feet long is paved with crushed rock 5/8 minus, unwashed so there are lots of fines. It packs hard just by driving over it and lasts a long time. Most reasonably priced relatively permanent surface I have found.

[Jerome Stanek]

I used 411 limestone on mine. After it rains and get packed it is like concrete

[Jeff A. Smith]

Bingo. In my case I have places where water occasionally washes across my driveway in torrents. Always leaves a ditch. These are the places in which I'm considering concrete with drain pipes... it's the cross-wash that's the problem.

And double bingo. I have the other problem in another part of my drive -- water flows down the driveway eventually dumping lime onto a concrete slab at the ned of my drive. It leaves the wheel ruts deep and void of gravel.

Jeff

[Tom M King]

The two most important factors for grading a road are that water can't cross it, and water cannot run along it anywhere. With that much road to take care of, if it's not paved, you will need a tractor, and both a grading blade, and a box blade. With the grading blade, you can cut ditches, pull gravel back up to the center that has been moved to the sides by traffic, and with the box blade you can even it all out across, and along the crown. There are other things that can pull the gravel up, and smooth it out, but I wouldn't want to be without those two blades.

A grading blade with a tailwheel is almost as good as a motorgrader. Without the tailwheel, when the front tires of the tractor go over a bump, the blade goes up or down relatively. With the tailwheel, it just pulls along behind the tractor. In relative woodworking terms, the difference between a block plane and a jointer.

A grading blade has three planes the blade can be set. It turns left or right, to throw material one way, or the other. It tilts side to side, which lets you cut ditches, and shape dirt. The third is that you can offset it to one side or the other probably more than you think. To cut a ditch, you offset it all the way over, put a sharp tilt for the cutting point to be down, and turn it so it pulls the dirt up out of the ditch.

Here, we're only 20 minutes from a Granite quarry, so stone is dirt cheap at the quarry.

The funny thing about that development is that we almost named it Kings Landing. We had narrowed the name down to Kings Landing, and Kings Bay. As Game of Thrones fans now, we wish we had named it Kings Landing.

For that driveway, I'd want a mid range category 2 tractor with at least two remotes (so you can operate the grading blade swing and tilt from the tractor seat), an 8' grading blade with tailwheel, and a 7' medium duty box blade. You can find all this stuff used.

I built a state spec road, not as long as yours but a bit less than a quarter mile, with these tools. I bought two dump trucks, hired drivers by the load, and sold both trucks for what I paid for them when the road was finished. Most of the cost of stone is in the hauling. It cost 26k to get it paved to state specs, but that was in 1999. I kept the tractors and blades, and they've been good to have many times since.

Type of stone recommended would vary Widely depending on what's available locally. More distance hauling equals more cost.

[John K Jordan]

Bingo. In my case I have places where water occasionally washes across my driveway in torrents. Always leaves a ditch. These are the places in which I'm considering concrete with drain pipes... it's the cross-wash that's the problem.

And double bingo. I have the other problem in another part of my drive -- water flows down the driveway eventually dumping lime onto a concrete slab at the ned of my drive. It leaves the wheel ruts deep and void of gravel.

Jeff

My 1/4 drive is not flat and curves several places as it rises (not too steep). I sloped it to the side everywhere but there are two places where the water crosses the drive. A couple of places I could slope enough and need to ditch one side someday to avoid minor washout running down the drive. One low spot used to wash out during every downpour where water came across a higher field and I planned to install a culvert. That and a couple of other places needed grading with the tractor every few months.

Crusher run was the worst - the water just carried the fines away. 3/4" was not much better - the tires rolled it and made tracks for the water to run in. A slight sideways slope covered wit 1/2" gravel was the best, over 1-1/4" fill in any ditches. Water just ran gently to the side in most places. (the base is well-compacted with my tractor and bobcat and driving on it for 8-9 years) But I still got minor washout and deeper ditches after gullywashn' downpours.

Then I put a few loads of what the my rock hauler just called "driveway material", only available, he said, in the winter. This turned out to be slag from a local steel mill. It went on black and dried grey, full of steel and very heavy, mostly rough rounded pieces 1/2-1" diameter with some fines. I didn't put it everywhere, just in the problem spots.

The stuff simply refuses to wash out, even where the water crosses the lane! No more little gulleys where the slope wasn't enough. Even the major washoff from the one field hasn't moved any that I can tell.

My theory is the stuff is so heavy compared to gravel the water just moves around the pieces instead of moving them. The supplier said he has put it on a lot of gravel driveways including his own, some of them quite steep with switchbacks. He claims everyone who tries it says it is a big improvement over gravel.

The long term plan is to concrete the entire drive but it costs too much for me right now. We may concrete the circle drive at the house this year and the rest in stages.

JKJ

[Tom M King]

I looked at the Vulcan site, and they have a search function for finding quarries. https://www.vulcanmaterials.com/cons...ion-aggregates

Here, there are trucks owned by independent operators lined up at Vulcan waiting for a load, so if you just need one, or a few loads of something particular, you can simply call Vulcan, and it ends up being cheaper than called a Heavy Equipment contractor to bring it.

What is used for "railroad ballast" will do the same sort of thing as the slag that John is talking about. It makes a bit of a rough surface to drive on, but you just have to drive slowly. I use it for backfilling my waterproofed French drain systems for old house basements.

Some local luck, if you happened to have a railroad track taken up anywhere near you, will be that there is a heavy equipment contractor that will have all the old railroad ballast stockpiled, and it should be available for an affordable price.