Crowlej,
I don't have a break down on the cost of just the 4n1 bucket. The 460 FEL and the 4n1 was around $3,700.
I don't have much experience using the tractor to push over and then mow over saplings. Other people are doing this but the saplings that I had where I COULD have used a tractor and rotary cutter I cut down with a brush cutter and chain saw. And I needed to cut down those sapling before I had a tractor so I really did not have much choice. From the few saplings I have chewed up with the MX6, the brush cutter and chain saw does a prettier job. Its just more time consuming and much more work.
If you are going to be cleaning up trails that has lots of timber I have found the best thing to do is to walk the trail/ground to be cleared with a chainsaw and cut things up into 4-8 foot long pieces. If you don't when you start pushing things around with the tractor you end up with long connected piles of wood. Its not easy to pickup and leaving it is a fire hazard. The 4n1 will easily pickup 4-8 foot long trunks and piles of slash. I have seen buckets with brush grabbers that would pickup more cut up wood easier and faster than a 4n1 but a 4n1 is just so darned useful doing other things. Sometimes I wish I had the bucket that has the hydraulic brush grabbers but I doubt it would be worth the time to switch between buckets. Not to mention the money it cost to have to bucket setups. Your questions had me thinking this weekend as I was working the tractor that the 4n1 is a very good compromise with a dedicated brush picker up bucket.
When clearing land/trails sometimes its nice to put the 4n1 in the dozer blade configuration. Sometimes its nice to have it as a plain on bucket. Other times you need to grab and pickup stuff. Those are three VERY usefull tools in one. The scraping part of the 4n1 I very seldom use but I do use it. All it takes is to change the bucket configuration is a wrist movement and maybe a thumb press. Very easy! /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif
Are you sure that a 4300 will do the work you need to do? I can understand the size requirement for trailering but the 4300 is a small tractor and you have lots of land to maintain. My neighbor was mowing this weekend on his
BX2200. He has a 4-5 acre lot and cuts an absent neighbor's road frontage as well as his own. He has roughly 1200 feet of flat road/driveway to cut. It must have taken him 2-3 hours to do the work. I can mow the 1600 feet of roadway I maintain in about an hour. But my roadway has some trees I have to mow around, ditches and inclines that force me to make the first pass in A range 2nd gear. Once away from the roadway edges I can put the tractor in 4th gear and move along. It takes me about three round trips to mow the 40 some odd feet of grassy roadway. I think my neighbor has to make three-four passes just on the grassy side of the road to get one side cut. He has a belly mower so I have a extra couple of feet of mowing coverage on the MX6. I have heard him hit rocks and it sounded real bad when he does. The MX6 hits a rock and while I don't like the sound I'm certainly not worried that the rock is going to break the mower or tractor. Time is money. The more I work on the tractor the more I realize the balance between time and money.
We own 53 acres. I have cleared one house site. I'm well into clearing 4 acres for pasture. Twas going to be a house site as well but the soil scientist just said it would cost $30,000 to put in a septic system. So it looks like I get to go clear another area that we were saving for the future. I have cleared the road which is a two lane 60 foot right of way ending in a culdesac that had been alowed to be over grown with trees. I have cleared some trails but not a lot. The property boundry is roughly 6,000 feet. I'll eventually clear at least a tractor wide area along the line for trail/fence/firebreaks.
The tractor has saved me at least $15,000 in 10 months. Actual tractor time is really only 8 months or so due to weather/work/sick days I could not work I have about 238 hours on the clock. By the time the tractor is two years old I think it will have paid for itself. I should have a few more decades of use to go at that point! /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif I don't for one second doubt having spent as much money as I did on the 4700. I think its the right size for the most part. Sometimes I wish it was bigger/heavier but not often. I certainly have more horsepower then traction.
One of the TBN matras is to get a tractor that is a little bit bigger than you think you need. I think its a true mantra! /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif
Later....
Dan McCarty
