Land Plane vs Box Blade

[Red Horse]

Well for a couple of years now I have been maintaining some long gravel common drives utilizing a heavy 65" box blade with 7 scarifiers as well as a 72" Land Pride Power rake. The land pride does a good job of "milling" the graded base (in this neck of the woods graded base is a mix of 3/4"crushed stone-or trap rock and the resultant dust. It is about the heaviest stuff you can get.. But if I have a section that is heavily potholed, I will set the scarifiers and rip out a good section in the heavily potholed area. Unfortunately some of the people on these drives think they are in the Baja- Plus a lot of them can't be bothered to take their trash to the dump so they have a packer pounding down their road at least once a week.

In anycase, if money were no object, I would go buy a land plane as there seems to be no doubt that in a lot of situations they can do a good job of leveling and filling voids with a few passes. But then I got to thinking. for 80 bucks I can buy 4 new heavy ripper shanks. I also have a heavy cutting edge lying around so I'm thinking, what about cutting the four shanks at the proper angle, welding some drilled mounting angles to them and then bolting the cutting edge on. Thus I would have a low front edge (as on a land plane) and then the cascading material would be accumulated in the box and if the build up becomes too much, you simply empty the box.

Any opinions?

 

[Gordon Gould]

Sounds interesting - definitely a clever way to add a removable blade to your BB. Some things to think about - the box blade aggressiveness is controlled by tilting the unit forward and back against the rear blade thus rising and lowering the front blade. Your additional front blade would move up and down more being so far forward of the rear blade. It will take some fine tuning to get it right so both blades work together. Also the land plane works off of long skids - totally different from a BB riding on the rear blade. I am sure you know this stuff but I wonder if adding skids somehow to your added front blade might help to make it more controllable ????

gg

 

[Texasmark]

I saw a land plane type thing used once and that's all it took. Any serious road leveler would do well to have one in his corral in my opinion. I would if my driveway were of the type where it would benefit from grading frequently.

 

[Red Horse]

Thx guys for your comments. and yes I was thinking of adding a heavy angle iron (like 2 x 2) by drilling a couple of holes through the side plates and simply bolting on.