If I were you, the only equipment I’d need would be a telephone. 
Good luck.
And turn down the opportunity to dig around my yard with a backhoe? That ain’t work, it’s play!
Agree with you about the loam. What is needed is “clay gravel”, which, from the sound of it, is what he’s getting. That material is commonly used here for road base. Washed gravel cannot be compacted - one needs that clay binder. Fill dirt might work but it is softer and won’t set up as well.
I think that may be a regional thing. Here, crushed stone is a different aggregate than washed gravel. The particles of washed gravel are rounded, not angular like crushed stone. The stone is actually stronger, I think because the angularity of the particles allows it to lock together.
W & P: you would be shocked at the drainage situations I come across regularly in my work. Sounds like you are headed in the right direction. If you are concerned about digging a sharp ditch across your emergency exit, I suggest opening that up so that it’s very wide, with say 6:1 slopes or something. If you’re afraid of it washing out, mix in some dry cement with the soil in the lowest part. Do you have some teeth on your box blade?. You could weld about 3 teeth onto your backhoe bucket.
I’m going to be renting, so I’m stuck with the equipment they have. I agree with you on a wide drain. That is an interesting idea about mixing in some concrete where I am most concerned about it. I happen to have a few hundered pounds that I bought a year ago for just that.
Do you have a tractor with a disk? Or a tiller? Just something to mix up the dry cement in the soil. I’d put it in a strip about, oh, a foot or two wide in the lowest ‘belly’ of the swale. Tamp it down a bit (drive over it a few times with the tractor, or the backhoe or something). Make sure the flowline ends up two or three inches lower than the surrounding grass, so that water doesn’t try to work underneath it.
You could put gravel there, but then the bush-hog would throw it everywhere.
Yes, the friction angle of angular material is higher, much for the reason you said. That shouldn’t matter too much for a driveway if you only have cars going over it. Drainage is a bigger concern, especially if the OP is in a northern area where frost and ice-lensing would be a problem.
Don’t mix any cement in there! You will regret it. You will have to scrape the drive again every 6 months to a year, you don’t want to be gouging up big chucks of concrete when you do that. Vehicles driving over a gravel drive compact the wheel tracks, turning them into little gutters that keep the rain in them encouraging it to wash down the lenght of the drive, and in doing so, mess it up.
I have a 1/4 mile long gravel drive I maintain with a 50 hp tractor and a box scrape. But if the water is washing along the lenght of the drive, then it isn’t properly crowned - I have the same problem. Crowning leaves the middle of the drive higher than the edges so water travels the short distance from center to edge (then into a good ditch). A box scrape won’t allow you to crown the road, you need a blade with an adjustable angle on it. Or if you can crown it with a box scrape I don’t have the skill to do so, and for a good ditch you really need a back hoe attachment.
Where was tractor operating 101 when I was in school?
-rainy
This is a relatively new property for us, so we don’t have any farm equipment ourselves yet. We may get some some day, but its not in the budget now. We got this place fairly cheap because it was so neglected. Beyond this, I’m not likely to need any equipment for a while.
Our neighbor may be able to help us out though. I’m kinda looking forward to running a backhoe though, so I hope he doesn’t insist on doing everything.
I’m not familiar with box scrapers (I’ve just seen one via google), but if it’s attached to the 3 pt linkage, you ought to be able to put an angle on it by adjusting the lift rods. You may need to wind one right up and the other right down, or even put them into different holes on the plough arms. Once you’ve got the required slope on the drive, level the rods.
You need to carry some of the weight of the scraper so the low side bites but the high side doesn’t. Once you’ve taken enough off the drive’s low side, slowly start leveling the scraper so the blade bites closer to the high side, until finally the whole blade is touching the drive. Remember that after the first run the tractor wheels will be on an angle too, so you often can wind up the lift rod quite a bit.
Thinking about it, you don’t need much adjustment. I think there was only 75mm of thread on our tractor’s right lift rod, and that was sufficient for any work we had to do. We had about 12km of farm roads.
You might also want to consider whether you really want to raise your drive by an entire 12 inches. Slipping off that in an ice storm or your periodic snows will not do your car any good. (And it won’t be that easy to get your car back up on it, either.)
You should only need enough material to let the water roll off onto the lawn. (If your dive is currently a cut through higher banks, of course, raising it a foot might be necessary.)
Our drive is a cut through higher banks ay this point. Besides, I live in the ozarks. If we get a big ice storm, I’m stuck anyway. When we got 3 inches of snow this year, the only way I got out was by backing up 50 yards and slowly building up enough momentum to get over the slope at the front of our drive. It took about ten tries each time.
That wasn’t recommended for the driveway. That was for the emergency access. I know better than that.
Wow, I’ll have to see if that’s possible on my tractor. If I’m remembering correctly (it’s dark out right now) I only have adjustment on one of the lift arms, and not that much. But maybe it is enough. All my ‘formal training’ on my tractor was conducted in about a half an hour while I drove around and my father-in-law gave me some pointers. And that was for bush-hogging, scraping and general operation. Did I mention the first time I ever drove a tractor was to go drive it back from the man I bought it from to our house on the highway…took a couple of hours to unpucker that day. Anyway, thanks for the advice. I’ll now stop hijacking.
Good luck to you, Prickly.
The amount of slope you need to make water drain well is only 1/4 inch of fall per foot of length. If you can get your blade picked up that far on one end, you’re good.
Thanks, that’s good to know. We just eyeball it. If you can see the slope, it’s enough 
So rainy even your little bit of adjustment ought to be ok. Remember though after your first run, the wheels on on side will be running on the angle you just made, so the blade will be cutting more angle, unless you level it in respect to the tractor.
The hard part is if your tractor and/or blade is the full width of the road and you’re trying to crown it. You just got to think about the situation and set the gear up to achieve the result.
It means a lot of looking over your shoulder whilst trying to drive in a straight line while lifting/lowering the linkage to get a smooth surface, though I think a box scraper might be easier in this regard. All I know is it gives me a pain in the neck after a while.
Just wait, one day you will be old like me and won’t be able to see it.
The 1/4 inch per foot rule is for hard (or hard-ish) surfaces. If you are planning to vegetate your slope (or grass-lined ditch or what-have-you), it needs to be steeper; I like to use 2% for a minimum although some folks use 1%. Any flatter than that and it will silt up and/or stay boggy.
For drain pipes or culverts, 1/2 " per foot (or 0.4%) is the flattest I’d use.
Next outting I’ll give this a try. Actually just scraped mine a couple of weeks ago.
Gets me in the low back.