Actually, that's not a bad approach. You could expand on it by elevating the bucket and fabricating a cone bottom with a gate of some type. Close the bottom, use the vacuum to fill it, then shut off the vacuum and open the gate to fill the hopper. You've created a pneumatic conveyor. You may need to adjust the air and solids flow at the suction to keep it from plugging. You could build a larger hopper to handle the larger spreader.Not wanting to reinvent wheels or spend extra time and money on this idea I sacrificed an old shop vac, that I had to replace switch on (luckily I save junk including switches lol.) anyways took the casters off and cut out the bottom fits perfectly and securely in a old 5 gal bucket. So I'll suck out 5 gal buckets full of fertilizer use the full buckets to fill my small pull behind spreaders and see how this works. Initial tests showed it's better and less of a mess than hand shoveling. Still planning to fill big 3 point spreader directly from totes with mini x. Thanks for the insight.
Not wanting to reinvent wheels or spend extra time and money on this idea I sacrificed an old shop vac, that I had to replace switch on (luckily I save junk including switches lol.) anyways took the casters off and cut out the bottom fits perfectly and securely in a old 5 gal bucket. So I'll suck out 5 gal buckets full of fertilizer use the full buckets to fill my small pull behind spreaders and see how this works. Initial tests showed it's better and less of a mess than hand shoveling. Still planning to fill big 3 point spreader directly from totes with mini x. Thanks for the insight.
I don't believe that old shop vac is powerful enough to create adequate suction. Briefly tried something like that with a scrap piece of ply wood with vac cut out on top of my pull behind it didn't work, It does have enough sucking power when used over a 5 gallon bucket though.Why not just create a plate (plywood?) with a hole in it for the shop vac that could sit on top of the tow-behind and 3-point spreaders and suck the fertilizer directly into the spreaders from the tote(s) with the shop vac ?