Those are not spare tires - trees falling on the metal cover and on the FOPS make too much noise. The tires help deaden it.
My shop is rather crowded and I have sandblasted the rims and painted them. That was the only place inside to store the tires while i was doing so.
Why it did not go into production? They said they never got it to work as well as they would like but if I wanted to play around with it, they would sell it to me since it was just collecting dust. Trying to remember which place it was. At that time, I was talking to a bunch of places. Well, when I assembled it, added the bucket, made the hoses and hooked them up, the bucket curl worked on my secondary hydraulics but not the swing. It would only swing about 2 inches. Naturally, I assume I did something wrong but I could see my hoses move when i activated each circuit. I opened up the hydraulic fitting on the side of the cylinder that was not working at all and nothing came out even when the valve was activated. I bypassed their piece of hose and hooked mine up directly and it works fine. At some point, I will try to figure out what is blocking their hose but I just replaced it with one of mine. I do not know if that was the problem they were having or not.
Moss, one reason I want to make a
grapple claw is to lessen the weight at the end. When i was lifting this at the end of my lifting boom, the back end of the tractor was getting light. Those tires might have made a difference after all. I actually picked up a used dynamometer so I can see how much it weighs.
And yes, it is nice to no longer have to strain myself picking up logs like that.
Before i put it away, I used it to grab a tree that had fallen across the trail. It worked nice. The tree was about 40' long but not a massive trunk. I was able to pull the tree away from the path and the break off the top and toss both pieces to the side. Certain combinations of angles of the loader and backhoe can make it where you can not see the bucket.
Ken
Ken
