Ok, I'll give it a shot...
- Scarfying I found easy. I shorten the top link and in a couple of passes things are loosend up.
Right. That is what you want to do anytime you have a "hump" or hard spot to cut off. Then you can drag it away with the blade. Put the scarifiers up, out of the way or even upside down when not in use.
- To scrape, I lengthen the top link and it scrapes quite nicely and fills the box quickly.
Right again, except sometimes either lengthening or even shortening might produce a slicing cutting with the front blade. It depends how much your front cutting blade sticks down below the side panels. Somewhere in the middle of that adjustment is where you want to set the top link so that the front blade barely, if at all cuts. The rear blade would also sit about the same as the front, so now it can smooth. They are even.
If I want to scrape aggressively or more like cut, I tilt the box forward a bit, shortening the top link so that the front blade cuts more than the rear would smooth.
I struggle a bit with what to do with the load that I have just scraped. Sounds like a basic question but I thought I would ask. Do you just spread it as you are moving forward, or, turn the tractor around and pull it back over the area you scraped it from and re-deposit it by gradually raising the blade?... or something else?
That's your choice.
Do you have a spot to drag it to on the road or area you are scraping, such as a low spot you want to build up or fill? If not, drag it to another spot out of the way where you can get to it later with either the boxblade or your fel bucket and move it.
If I'm scraping a 300 ft drive, if I am not spreading as I scrape, I'm going to leave about 10 little 'hills' on the drive. Do you just go back and spread them after?
Yes, spread them out after or move them with your fel bucket like I said above. Sometimes you will find "low" spots on the road you want to fill and compact to make the road more level.
- Levelling - thats a nother story. I cannot for the life of me seem to be able to level the driveway. What position should the blade be in for levelling? Should my toplink be all the way out, all the way in, or somewhere in between? How high would you raise the rear blade off the surface of the drive while doing levelling pass?
I touched on this above where somewhere in between is the spot you want for finish grading. Not necessarily leveling, so I assume you mean finish grading to get a smooth finish, right. Leveling would mean (to me) to cut off the high spots and fill the low spots. I set the blades so they are about the same, meaning the top link somewhere in the middle to achieve this blade position. Then I drag the box. What this does is the front blade slightly cuts off any standing ridges while the rear blade is smoothing the dirt out. But the front is not aggressively cutting. One important thing to remember is to compact those low spots you filled, or when you go through them with the boxblade, it will sink/cut deeper in those areas unless you've firmed it up by compacting.
I thought I knew what I was doing. Figured I would lower the 3PT a bit as I felt that I went over a high spot and then raise it a bit after picking up some material from the high spot. Is this generally what the rest of you do also?
Yes, to a point.
When you say a "high spot", what do you mean? Like a hump in the road that you want to cut off or is it a gradual rise and fall in the road that you can live with? If it is a hump and you want to cut it off, the best way is to lower the scarifiers and grind up that hump until it is loose to the point where it's level with the rest of your drive. Then drag the box over the loosened soil and drag it away or spread it to a low section. You can also do this in reverse by using your boxblade as a bulldozer blade. Be advised that you can bend the the drag links this way, so be careful. I bent mine but reinforced them so they are super strong now. I use this technique frequently because it produces great results. By bulldozing in reverse, the rear blade cuts off the dirt and leaves a perfect path for your tractor tires to follow. There will not be any humps or bumps that way. Plus, if you are contouring the road, the tractor tires will sit on the contour you just cut. Your blade will remain constant, as long as you don't take too much of a cut and stall the tractor or bend the lower drag links.
- Dragging material. I've found when I drag material it tends to quickly mix up with the ground I am dragging it over. I'm guessing that my toplink is set to long or my 3PT is set too low and I am doing too much scraping. What is the best position to drag material in so that you are just moving it and not scraping.
That middle top link position I was talking about where the front blade and rear blade are sitting equally from the ground. So neither one cuts or drags, but they are both the same position. This may or may not be the middle of your top link, but should be somewhere near it. Just depends where the top link ends up with the blades in that position. But the key is to get the blades in that position no matter where the top link is.
Figured I might as well ask how one adjusts the guage wheel hight if using a landscape rake or a box blade.
You can adjust the leveling or guage wheels so that the tips of the rake or the tips of the blade barely hit the ground when on a level surface. That way your implement can still work by engaging the ground, but no more that you have it set at. How it works...the wheels now ride on a smoother surface than in front of the blade or rake, so it keeps the implement relative to the smoother surface you have just created. This is much the same principle I was talking about using the boxblade in reverse as a bulldozer. The surface behind is now smoother the the surface ahead and your tractor wheels ride on the smoother surface keeping the boxblade relative to the smoother surface.
But back to the guage wheels, I don't use mine so much once I've finished grading and smoothing the road. Once it hardens up and is compacted, I just drag the box in the neutral position described above and use "float" on the 3pt. Then it follows the smoothness of the (already) smooth road and just dresses it up. What I use the guage wheels for is spreading a lift of dirt at an even level or amount. So I set the guage wheels to be 1" lower than the cutting blades and grab a boxful of dirt or gravel and spread. I then spread an even 1" lift until the box is empty. I use the fel bucket to move the material to those areas I want to use this spreading technique so I don't lose too much material trying to drag it a long ways.
