hey 3RRL:
nice looking mod on the loder bracket to rear ROPS bracket:
I got a question, did you remove the lower ROPS bracket and weld that into the long arm going forward?
also does that plate on the FEL tube get in the way for putting the Back hoe on/off? notice it seems to cover up the backhoe mount plates some...
again great looking work you do up there...
NOW for the question, put me in that column of people who broke the front end doing something that a tractor is not really made for... I bent my ZL20 FEL down in the right side slightly down from level when (ramming submerged concrete piers attempting to loosen them enough to remove.) and later left the tractor in 4x4 and went to scoop up some wet sand/dirt that was on well compacted clay. the bucket dug into the clay and I scooped up raising the FEl and sheared off a front drive axle, costs were fair and low enough to make me not hurt in the pocketbook too bad but not so bad as to be sticker shocked either. Tommy @ affordable had the parts & got them to me quickly. also to be fair, I've used my 284 more like a bulldozer than a tractor, often skidded large logs (support one end and drive off, pulling hard enough to raise front tires on more than one log) drive it regularly into the crick/washout, over a rather steep bank and dig up wet sand/gravel (full buckets worth) and back back out. (I still do this and dug enough down to get to bedrock/flag stone.) and been hauling bucket fulls of that out to build patios at the farm & at my GFs house.
I put 3 buckets full of sand into the 1/2 ton truck and had to shovel one back out as it fully flattened the springs... so lifting weight is no big deal, a friend of mine uses his to run 2 round bales of hay out of the field, 1200 lbs ea, one on front and one on back of his 284, (we brought our tractors from china as a crate deal.)
Tractor weight I would say you are close to right, I used large fork lift to remove all the tractors from the delivery truck, (7500 lb fork truck) it easly lifted one tractor, the back hoes shared a crate and the fork truck had a little grunt to get them up so if you have 284, ZL20 FEL and JW03 hoe then I would say closer to 6500 lbs total weight... I have towed my tractor fel and hoe one time (from shop to my farm) on a 10,000 trailer and full size chevy dually. the trailer was very well squatted down...
mark