3/4" Crushed Stone in Wisconsin: Clear Angular Stone That Stays Open

The block wall that leans out by its third spring was almost always backfilled with whatever was left on the driveway pile. Dense-graded traffic bond packs tight because it carries fines, and tight is the wrong condition behind a wall in a state where frost drives down four feet and the thaw comes from the top down. Meltwater soaks into the backfill, meets frozen ground underneath it, and freezes again where it sits. 3/4" crushed stone is the material that ends that cycle: angular, about three-quarter inch, screened clear of the dust so the spaces between the pieces stay empty all winter.

Plenty of buyers here ask for it as clear stone. That is the more useful name, because clear is the property being paid for.

Sharp faces and empty gaps, next to a pile of traffic bond

• Every piece shows broken faces. Nothing is rounded, so a stone seats against its neighbor rather than rolling past it.
• Color runs gray through buff depending on the crush, and it stays that color because there is no dust film on it.
• Walk through a pile and your boots stay clean. Walk through dense-graded base and they do not. That is the screening, and it is the whole product.
• Push a shovel in and pull it out. Clear stone leaves the blade bare. Material with fines in it does not.
• The pieces never lock into a hard slab the way a compacted base does. They settle against each other and stop there.

Splash pockets, wall backfill and a shore edge that keeps washing out

Three jobs account for most of what gets ordered around here.

• A splash pocket under a downspout. Roof water off a steep pitch lands hard, and on Fox Valley clay it cuts a trench in the mulch within a season. A pocket of angular stone takes the hit and lets the water spread instead of gouging.
• Backfill behind a block, timber or stone wall. The stone column carries water down to a drain line instead of letting it load the back of the wall through the freeze.
• The edge of a pond or a lake frontage where wave slop and runoff keep taking soil. Angular stone holds a line that rounded material will not.
• Around footings and under building pads, where the stone gives bearing support and still lets water move below a deep frost line.
• Around perforated tile in a utility trench, where at three-quarter inch the pieces cannot drop through the slots of a standard line.

Where 3/4" crushed stone is the wrong call

Being blunt about this saves a re-order.

• It is not a driveway surface. With no fines to bind it, it stays loose under a tire, rides out to the shoulders and gives poor footing. A drive wants a compacted 3/4" Traffic Bond base with a finer surface over it.
• It is not a paver bedding course. Pavers need a screeded fine layer, not three-quarter inch rock.
• It will not survive a plow blade. Where a plow scrapes every winter, angular clear stone ends up in the yard with the snow.
• It is not shore armor where waves are undercutting a clay bluff. That is RipRap work, in a size a wave cannot move.
• It does not dry out wet ground by itself. Stone covers a wet spot; a graded outlet is what drains it.

Depth behind a wall, under a splash pocket and along a shoreline

• Wall backfill: a column roughly 12 inches wide against the full height of the back of the wall, carried down to a drain line that daylights where water is allowed to go.
• Splash pockets: 4 inches over a fabric bed, with the finished stone level with the surrounding grade so the mower does not find it.
• Shore and pond edges: 6 inches, thicker where runoff concentrates into one channel.
• Trench and pipe surround: bed the tile and cover it, then wrap the whole trench in a separation fabric before backfill. Fines migrating in from the sides is what kills a drain, not the stone itself.
• Under a footing or a pad: follow whatever the plans call for, and keep the layer continuous so there is no pocket where water can stand.

Tonnage for four splash pockets, 40 feet of wall and a pond edge

Length times width times depth in inches divided by 12, then divided by 27, gives cubic yards. This site's calculator pages put #57, #67 and 3/4 inch crushed stone at about 2,800 lb per cubic yard, which is 1.40 tons per yard, so the last step is one more multiplication.

• Example, four downspout pockets, each 6 ft by 3 ft at 4 inches. Together that is 72 square feet. 72 x 0.333 = 24 cubic feet, divided by 27 = 0.89 cubic yards, times 1.40 = about 1.25 tons.
• Example, a 40 ft wall backfilled 12 inches wide to a height of 4 ft: 40 x 1 x 4 = 160 cubic feet, divided by 27 = 5.9 cubic yards, times 1.40 = about 8.3 tons.
• Example, a pond edge band 30 ft long and 4 ft wide at 6 inches: 120 square feet x 0.5 = 60 cubic feet, divided by 27 = 2.2 cubic yards, times 1.40 = about 3.1 tons.

One cubic yard covers roughly 81 square feet at 4 inches and 54 square feet at 6 inches. Those figures are approximate and the weight is a published average, so a heaped load will not match to the pound. The stone calculator runs the same arithmetic and adds a small extra allowance by default so you do not come up short at the far end of a wall.

3/8 inch chips, #57 stone and Drain Rock alongside this size

The short version: this stone is what you reach for when the stone itself has to bear against something and still let water through. Set your tonnage and a delivery date on this page. Delivery is arranged at checkout from your ZIP code, so pick a dump spot the truck can reach and reverse out of before you book the date.