PTO powered woods trailer

[kilo]

So I'm new to the whole tractor ownership, but I have a burnt out Jeep that I've thought about possibly using it's frame for a trailer. Mainly to foward wood from the wood lot up to the house.

The drivetrain is un-harmed from the heat and my plan was to use the tranmission and transfer-case to take PTO power and put it to the wheels to avoid getting all hung up in the muddy spots of the woodlot.

Any comments, plans, do's or don'ts for this sort of idea?

Thanks
Kristian

 

[rus_geek]

Does your PTO match engine speed or ground speed? My PTO doesn't have a ground-speed option, so the trailer would either be pushing my tractor or running slower than the tractor. With a fixed speed PTO, you need some way to adapt the speed of the trailer on the fly.

-rus-

 

[kilo]

It's engine speed, I plan to figure out the gear ratio's to figure out the closest match to ground speed.

although the tractor is HST so it makes it a bit harder to get a perfect match everytime since it doesn't have a set gear ratio. Hopefully the tranmission in the jeep chassis has something that'll work out close to low range speed on the HST

 

[tessiers]

never tried a powered trailer but I know the front wheels over run the rear so I would think you want the trailer wheels turning a little slower than the tractor wheels. I can think of several times I would have liked that option.

 

[brandoro]

If I had a trailer I could power from the PTO I suspect I would only power it when the tractor couldn't move it, to get out of a hole or up a steep hill so I wouldn't worry too much about matching speed exactly with the tractor. Find a low enough gear that it would be easily controllable and use it as required.:thumbsup:
Make sure you have some run out space when you power it up the first time

 

[Taylortractornut]

Dads Pasquali tractor has a lever to sync the pto top the pinion shaft of a trailer. Back when the mills took short paper wood/ pulp lots of trailers were made from truck rear ends. One of my building mentors showed me one he built that was for a man that had an old tractor and a new truck. He didnt want his new 76 Ford i nthe bushes so he had Jimmy build a trailer out of an old 1 ton single wheel truck frame.

He made it from the read half and left the trucks transmission and pto. This was to run the old pulp winch made from a car axle. He would drive the 8N into the woods a d winch up his stick wood and place it i nthe bunk, then on the way out if it got slippery he would put the transmission in gear and turn on the tractor pto again and take off. when he got traction he could disengage the pto. When he was out he would hitch the load to his truck and go to the wood yard.

Later a he had a bigger tractor then took and old army truck and made a trailer from it and put a knuckle boom a bunk o nthe back and used it behind his 4 wheel drive tractor when in the mud he had 8 wheel drive. on that one he did have an over running clutch.
The next one was made from and single axle truck rearend and had a samller prentice loader on it. They seemed to work real good I sure miss not seeing them any more.

With a hydrastat tractor it would work realy well just make sure to put a good slip clutch in there somewhere.

 

[BHD]

one could possible put a over run clutch, and have the ratio such that if the trailer is puling OK the RPM of shaft coming to the PTO would spin some faster, but if you started to get slowed down it would "automatically start to power the trailer, as the PTO shaft would be then moving faster than the shaft coming from the trailer, engaging the trailer wheels,

the only problem is on a live PTO one would need to watch the system when stopping as if you clutched the tractor the trailer would keep pushing, you from the PTO until the PTO was disengaged, the old tractors with out the live PTO would have an advantage in this application,

another idea would be some type of (thinking electric clutch), that when the tractor clutch was depressed the electric clutch would be disengaged automatically via switch and would disinge the trailer (JD used a electric clutch on the header drive of the 4400 6600 and 7700 combines)

 

[lhfarm]

So I'm new to the whole tractor ownership, but I have a burnt out Jeep that I've thought about possibly using it's frame for a trailer. Mainly to foward wood from the wood lot up to the house.

The drivetrain is un-harmed from the heat and my plan was to use the tranmission and transfer-case to take PTO power and put it to the wheels to avoid getting all hung up in the muddy spots of the woodlot.

Any comments, plans, do's or don'ts for this sort of idea?

Thanks
Kristian

Any chance of restoring the jeep to running order? You could have a "farm jeep" that would be one of the handiest tools on the place. Check out the old ads at our website Farm Jeep. You don't need the 3pt or pto setup, but you could have a real powered wagon. You wouldn't need more than seat for the driver and you don't need to be street legal. And it doesn't have to be pretty.

 

[Egon]

You might want to consider getting a torque converter into the PTO drive train so you have some slush!:thumbsup:

Or run the jeep with a hydraulic pump.

 

[ayelvington]

A PTO-powered trailer was just sold at auction here the other day. It got a lot of attention because we have a lot of mud in these parts.

There wasn't much concern about the sync issue as you might think. The reality was that if you got stuck, it was likely the trailer causing the problem, so use the trailer to help push you out. No one expected to leave the PTO engaged unless you were stuck.

Good luck!