Box Blade for L175

[JCByrd24]

As Willy touched on sometimes you need a heavier box blade to penetrate the gravel depending on a number of factors, as the 3PH does not have down pressure. The hooked scarifiers help pull them deeper, but that may not be necessary. If yours don't adequately dig, add some weight somehow. Using a box blade takes a little learning but I got pretty good at dressing my driveway. My process went something like this:
1) Lower scarifiers and roll box forward by shortening toplink and scarify driveway to roughly the depth of deepest pothole. Goal here is not not collect the material in the box, just loosen it all up, especially potholes/washboard. This takes a bunch of passes to ensure it's loosened. The grading scraper really shines over the box blade in theis

2) If you have bulk material to move/spread, raise scarifiers and level the box out/tilt forward so the front cutting edge can dig some. The digging power can be regulated by the tilt of the box much easier than trying to regulate with the 3PH. You set it so that even with your 3ph lever all the way down in float it'll dig the amount you want. This way when your front end goes over a pile or in a hole your box doesn't react and worsen the washboard effect.

For me this step was usually to bring material from the edges to the center to re-crown as I don't have a rake or blade that angles. Tilting the box side to side on the 3PH doesn't accomplish this as well as one might think, the material just stacks up in the lower end of the box.

3) At this point the drive was fairly well loose with random piles in the center from pulling in from the edges. At this point you roll the box back so you have clearance under the front edge and you are dragging on the back edge. Again this is adjustable, but the goal at this point is not to dig much at all, but to collect the piles and distribute them into low spots and start re-packing the drive. Again you set this with the 3ph all the way down so you don't have to constantly fuss with the lever. You might tilt the box side to side to aid in crowing.

[John Buffum]

That's the one I built! I just stretched it to 60 inches because I have a small but serious tractor instead of a riding lawnmower.

BTW, store bot'n scarifiers are curved at the bottom, with a tooth. This thing just has straight blades. How well does straight blades work? If it needs the hook at the bottom, I can cut and weld that.

Supposed to rain, tomorrow. I'll be out there!

[Willy]

The project came out nicely as built by you, very nice!

However the picture below from the Ebay plans show an application that it is probably more suited to, leveling soil in a garden.

I'm not exactly sure of what your county road looks like but I'd wager that it's one heck of a lot harder than the garden below.
Unless it has been well saturated with water it will be as hard as the back of my head. When it contains enough moisture to make it somewhat workable you will find a whole other set of problems.

I used to maintain roads for about 15 years for a Govt. highways maintenance contractor and can testify that it sometimes takes all a 50,000 lb. grader can do to grade and reshape a road. Seven passes minimum to do a decent job, and then unless it has been followed by a water truck and at least a wobbly wheel packer on the back of the grader,it won't last a week. As a matter of fact we would not get paid by the Govt. unless it was packed and watered.

Not wanting to rain on your parade John, just don't want you to get your hopes up too high. I hope I'm wrong and it works for you. Like I say I have no idea what the road looks like or how much work you have to do to it.
Just want you to be aware of the fact that it takes more than simply filling in the low spots.

Good luck John.

[J Tiers]

If yu use Imgur, you get a ton more editing and resizing options, and they are easy to use resizing as the pic is imported. PB was never much good, I'd not pay for it, Imgur is far far better.

[John Buffum]

By clicking the Photobucket link, you should get a slideshow of my images that fit onscreen. I had forgotten how good PB was for doing that.

Photoshop Elements 15 got the pix down as small as I could using their Save As utility. I'll have to retake the pix with a lower res in the camera.

[Willy]

I'm on Photobucket. Is using Photobucket OK?
http://s1272.photobucket.com/user/bu...ow/Box%20Blade

Seems to work.

I can certainly see the images from the link you provided John and I was going to place them here for you by copying the image location and pasting that into the address bar that appears when when you click on the "insert image" icon at the top of the reply box.
However the images are huge and will have to be downsized somewhat so that we're not looking at an image so large that you need to scroll up, down, and sideways just to see one photo, never mind all three.

You should be able go into your PB page and resize them to say 800x600 in order to display them here.
We're getting closer John, don't give up now.

[J Tiers]

Says at the bottom I am not allowed to. Hmmm.

[IMG]c:\john\metals projects\box blade\back.jpg[/IMG]

That was a try. Did it work?

No, and it did not work because it references your C drive as the source. That is not going to put it in the correct form or location to be posted. It has to be available on the internet at an address, OR at the VP site, for the forum software to call it when someone looks at the thread.

Either store the picture on a service like Imgur, and reference it from there per their tools, or use the convoluted process to store it on this site. Imgur is far easier.

[John Buffum]

I'm on Photobucket. Is using Photobucket OK?
http://s1272.photobucket.com/user/bu...ow/Box%20Blade

Seems to work.

[John Buffum]

Says at the bottom I am not allowed to. Hmmm.

[IMG]c:\john\metals projects\box blade\back.jpg[/IMG]

That was a try. Did it work?

[dave_r]

You should be able to post pictures, it's just a little convoluted process to post pictures using this web site to host them. There are posts that detail how to do it somewhere...

[John Buffum]

We live on a dirt road. The county maintains the road during election years. During off years, we're on our own. I bought a Kubota L175 tractor, http://www.tractordata.com/farm-trac...bota-l175.html . I made a box blade from an Ebay plan https://www.ebay.com/itm/3pt-Box-Bla...72.m2749.l2649

I'd like to enclose are a few pictures, but I am not allowed to. I painted it John Deere green. No reason. Just wanted to.

Wednesday, when the paint is cured, I maintain our road. It sure needs it.