Plug aerator

[czechsonofagun]

I posted this in attachments, got very little response

Anyway, to tickle my ego and also hoping that maybe somebody will be looking for ideas here one day, I post it on this board one more time.

The frame was meant for a tiller I started building years ago. I scratched that plan after getting Troy Horse, seems like thats all we need on our land.
Anyway, for the frame to work as an aerator I had to add brackets to hang the cylinder under the frame so I done that.



Spoons are from Aggri Supply and to mount them I used two inch long pieces of tubing (the right ID was hard to find, ordered from MCMaster Carr) welded on a 4" OD steel tube. Spoons are secured by one 5/16" bolt only, I figured thats enough.

The width is only 42" and I can fit nicely between rows of my vineyard.

I hope somebody will find it inspirational, I was wishing for plug aerator for years. The total cost was less than 400 dollars.

 

[texasranger556]

Yep, this is the place to post a project like that. Nice work!

 

[bspeedy]

Very nice. My neighbor has been looking for a small aerator and they are big $$. I'm going to show this to him. Well done.

 

[npalen]

How many spoons per row and how many rows at what spacing between?
Nice work!

 

[blakester]

love it. how deep does it go in what kind of soil? I have been thinking about this for a couple years. Out here in Naramata B.C. our vineyard has quite a bit of clay so the ground is very hard. I was thinking i'd need a couple hundred pounds of weight on something like that to really get it to sink in.

 

[TMGT]

Looks good, I built one a few years ago with similar specs but didn't have a frame so had to build everything from scratch.
The agri supply spoons are a good deal, are the tines mounted in sections to allow a little bit of movement for light turning?
I ended up doing 8 rows on 4 spools with 8 tines per row.

 

[czechsonofagun]

7 rows. One is 5 spoons - the first one - after finishing it, I realized it is easier to do 6 in a row, I did not measure the angle, all is set by eye. The total number of spoons is 41.

Seems like in our clay, I have to use it after rain, when the soil is dry it does not go that deep - even with 6 cinder blocks on top.

I plan to pour concrete into cinder blocks. The goal is to have 4 weights heavy enough.

Yes, the spoons wiggle a bit.

 

[TMGT]

With mine I usually have 6-700lbs of weight on the aerator and it still struggles unless the ground has just the right amount of moisture.
Found some pictures of mine on the phone.

ATTACH]543689[/ATTACH]


Where abouts in va are you?[

 

[czechsonofagun]

That is a lot of weight, how wide is it?

Edit: I am up North, near Warrenton.

 

[TMGT]

50", about the only way I can get enough penetration, typically I use the bags of fertilizer I'm going to put down for weight and add some cast iron plate weights under them. 600 lbs is my normal operating weight.

As you said, we have clay here.