Calculator
Crushed shell driveway calculator
Put a length and a width in and the quantity appears here.
Where the numbers come from
3"
A new driveway
Three inches of shell over a compacted base, laid in two lifts rather than one. Why two lifts.
1"
A refresh
An inch brings the depth and the color back on a driveway that has thinned out. You don't need three again if the base underneath is still sound.
10%
Allowance
Ground is never flat and some gets lost spreading it. The allowance is a separate line above, not buried in the total.
The arithmetic is no secret. Length times width gives the area, the depth turns it into a volume, and 27 cubic feet make a cubic yard. Every word of that is in the glossary if any of it is unfamiliar.
The other material
Crushed stone driveways, and why they come in tons
Switch the toggle to stone and a second figure appears. That isn't decoration. Shell is sold by the cubic yard on Cape Cod and crushed stone is sold by the ton, so a quote for one can't be laid next to a quote for the other without converting first.
We convert at 1.35 tons to the yard. That matches what the yards around here publish: T.W. Nickerson in South Chatham quotes about 1.3, Ondrick Natural Earth puts a yard of stone at 2,700 pounds, and the regional material weight tables give crushed stone the same 2,700 average.
Shell gets no tonnage figure here, and that is deliberate. No supplier publishes a reliable weight per yard for it. The numbers floating around online come from calculator sites that disagree with each other by a third, and guessing would be worse than leaving it out.
Deciding between the two? Shell or gravel: which holds up better compares how each one ages, which matters more than the delivered price.
What it can't tell you
- Whether the base underneath is sound. A driveway that needs excavating and regrading is a different job from one that needs a top-off, and only looking will tell you which.
- How much excavation the job takes. That is usually the biggest line on a quote and it has nothing to do with the surface quantity.
- What it costs. Delivered material is one part of the price, and the base work is most of the rest.
More on that in what decides the cost.
Get an estimate
Want the quantity checked against the actual driveway?
Tell us the town and roughly how big it is. We will come and walk it rather than quote off a satellite photo, and tell you straight whether it needs doing at all.
- Free, with no obligation after
- We look at the base, not just the surface
- Across Bourne to Orleans
