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Was in my local Fleet Farm today. They had a unadvertised clearance special. reg. $628 sale $534. Plus I opened a orange card account and saved another 10%. Since a box blade was on my list for spring I took it home today.
My trails when I bought the property were crap. This works slicker than pig snot to move and level sand. dirt, gravel whatever. Turn the teeth the other way and they will dig to loosen what ever your working on.
Before
I'll find out this summer. My plot's are fairly new with a lot of roots yet. I'm hoping this will dig them out. Plan is to go over the plot with the back blade and then finish with the ATV disk.
I have always thought that using the teeth of a back blade to loosen the soil prior to cultipacking may work as well or perhaps better than using a disc. Or as you have indicated maybe rip it up with the back blade followed by a disc would be the answer. Be sure to let us know how it goes for you in spring.
I have always thought that using the teeth of a back blade to loosen the soil prior to cultipacking may work as well or perhaps better than using a disc. Or as you have indicated maybe rip it up with the back blade followed by a disc would be the answer. Be sure to let us know how it goes for you in spring.
You don't want to use a chisel plow anyway, it pulls up the inorganic sub soil and dilutes your top soil if you go too deep. Using the rippers to pull out the surface roots and rocks sounds ideal to prep for a disk.
I have always thought that using the teeth of a back blade to loosen the soil prior to cultipacking may work as well or perhaps better than using a disc. Or as you have indicated maybe rip it up with the back blade followed by a disc would be the answer. Be sure to let us know how it goes for you in spring.
I've done this, the ripper teeth work pretty darn good for some light tillage and prepping a plot for the first time. You can loosen soil and if neede fill\level up low spot. You can also rake out roots and debris Stay alert and try not to hook something big.
Box graders are nice tools when you need one. Like stated they are great for leveling that center hump out of trails and gravel driveways. The teeth set as deep as they can works like a shallow ripper and will break the soil tension and works for breaking roots and the like and the edge of your wooded plots. However they can also turn into essentially an anchor for your tractor! They make a good counter weight as well.
I bought a 6' one used for $200 once. Used it about a year and it was just too big for my machine. Had a guy at work that wanted to borrow it so I lended it to him. He offered me $300 for it - no hesitation on my part - SOLD! I have access to another one if/when the time comes.
I use my box blade for driveway maintenance at times......and use it ALLOT for a ballast box when doing lots of loader work. I hang suitcase weights on mine to get the weight up to about 900 lbs (IIRC). Pretty slick and really turns it into a super grader with that much weight too.
I have used the tines as suggested above to pull roots and such in new plots. But that has not worked out real well. The box catches allot of debris and kinda becomes a nuisance for my purposes. I have seen the shanks just mounted on a tool bar......and I believe a tool like that would be pretty nice as a poo mans chisel plow. A guy could easily make that using the teeth you already have and move them from one to the other (?). A single shank "ripper" could provide a cheap "doner tool" to add a tool bar to it. ;) I see those for $100 on C/L from time to time.
How many tines did you have down when you were getting it plugged up? The ripper bars on the dozers I've seen usually only have 3-4 teeth on them. Just enough to tug and tear the roots, but not too many to collect stuff between them.