Too Hard for Box Blade?

[Clemson]

I used a box scraper for the first time Saturday, and I am somewhat disappointed. I was trying to scrape off a spot in the pasture to locate a shed. I needed to cut the high side down by a foot and add a foot to the low side. I had the devil of a time just cutting through the sod. Am I expecting too much from my box blade? I experimented with angles by cranking the top link in and out. I worked with the scarifiers all the way up, all the way down, and at an intermediate position. I even tried to back-blake the spot. Right now it looks plowed.

 

[jrlichina]

If your ground is too hard and dry you may need to add some weight to the box. Try using cement blocks or something else heavy placed on top of the box. This will give it more "bite" rather than skipping over the ground. You may also want to try to angle it slightly(Horizontally) This gives a higher concentration of force on a smaller edge allowing it to cut better.

 

[CTyler]

Having done this the last couple days taking out small areas of grass....

I had the scarifiers down with the box tipped forward quite a bit. This allows the scarifiers to dig in the best and deepest. The blade on the box does tend to ride over the grass a bit. A couple passes should get the grass off depending on the weight of your BB. Mine is about 575lbs. You could add weight to in the form of bricks, sand, dirt etc..

 

[RobS]

I had a miserable experience with the box blade and vegetation this weekend. I should have known better but I was trying to eliminate some construction ruts without tearing up the "turf" too much. The trouble is the box blade works best with loose, flowing material and the vegetation (particularly roots) act to keep everything knitted together. That makes big clumps and the box blade becomes a tangled mass of roots, weeds and stalks. In one area I did fully remove the vegetation (with scarifiers and landscape rake). Then the box worked just fine. My other areas look awful, all plowed up like you mentioned.

Best plan is a two step approach. First remove all the vegetation, then use the box to recontour the subsoil.

I'm going to borrow a disc and see if I can chop up the vegetation enough to make it flow in the box, but I'm not overly hopeful /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

[normde2001]

You did not mention why the blade didn't work. Did the scarifiers fail to dig in, or did they dig so deep that you lost traction. I can't imagine any porous material that the scarifiers on my cheap 5' blade won't dig into, when set at the correct angle, and usually to the point that I lose traction. Got to be something wrong with the blade tips or the toplink angle.

 

[Clemson]

I should have given more information. This is a 6' box scrape behind a MF 230 diesel. It did tend to skip right over the turf with the scarifiers up. I managed to lose traction with the scarifiers all the way down, but that only happened in one spot (after a pretty good overnight rain). After drying out for a few hours I was able to pull the box with the scarifiers all the way down without bogging the tractor down. The tractor has Ag tires, by the way. 5 points in the ground represented a pretty good load. I had figured that the box would leave level, smooth ground behind it. I was just wrong. It appears to have been cut up, but not lifted. After several passes with the scarifiers, I was able to pull about 80% of the turf off the plot, but it still looks rough. Maybe that is just what I get for trying to do dozer work with a utility tractor. Any other ideas? How far forward should I tilt the box?

Weighting the box may be a possibility. This is a light duty piece of equipment from a company called "All American." The welds, gussets, paint, and general construction looked as good as several others that cost more, however.

Clemson

 

[JFarms]

I had hills and valleys in my field a few years back. Multiple passes with scarifiers loosed the hills and made things ugly. Next I raised the rippers letting the box move the ground around. My final passes were made with the box tilting back slightly so it could smooth the ground like a knife spreading butter, and things started looking good. Patience was the key. I couldn't start without the rippers, and avoided them in the end. A few years of rain, weeds and mowing and its looking fine. BTW, I was leveling in dry August. Can't say the same technique would work in wet clumping clay. Best of luck.

 

[Gary_in_Indiana]

<font color="blue"> "Best plan is a two step approach. First remove all the vegetation, then use the box to recontour the subsoil." </font>

Would running over the vegetation with a tiller before using the box blade work even better and easier?

 

[WVBill]

Clemson: Does your box have a rear blade? Fixed or movable?
If your box has a fixed rear blade then tilting the box back with the top link will make the rear blade ride on the ground behind the box and will keep the front blade from digging in. In the final grading process, this can be a good thing but for the initial scraping it gets in the way.

It's almost impossible to get a box blade to take that first "bite" in sod. The approach that's worked for me is to use a shovel to cut a slit in the sod and then drop the box blade into the slit and pull from there (no rippers). The sod rolls up nicely into the box.

 

[19th_VA]

I have no problem cutting into field grass (I guess not exactly sod) with my 625# 6 footer. Sounds like weight is one of the factors. I have read a bunch of posts about creative ways to add weight to a boxblade. Or, if you have a lot to do, perhaps sell the lightweight one get a heavy duty one.