I am building a root rake for my TD6-62. I have never used one but am clearing some land and I think it would be useful. I scrounged a piece of 8" high pressure gas transmission pipe from a scrap heap for main beam. Then last fall I picked up these homemade spanner wrenches from work that were used on a 1 time job. We had some weird giant round nuts with holes instead of flats. I will post some pics as I go. I plan on 5' across with 12" tooth spaceing. that should be about all my antique dozer can handle.
I dig it!
Yair . . . gusbratz .I will watch this thread with interest. I am just finishing an eight foot stick-rake for a 55hp wheel tractor . . . slightly different application I think. Cheers.
got the welds prepped, teeth cut into the shape, and tacked on today. starting to look like they belong on there!
Looking great so far! Nice job.
I got the teeth all welded up today, I used 7018, 1 pass of 5/32 at 180amps them one cover pass of 3/16 at 215 amps. Hopefully that is enough. I usually waste a lot of time on these projects over welding every thing so I am trying to keep it to the minimum and see if any teeth break off. I don’t thing the td6 has enough power but we will see. Then I had a sudden inspiration and put cat 1 3 point hitch mounts on it. now I can use my tractor to break up the road for regarding it and also the rake can be moved around with out the dozer since you know when I need it she will probably be on the other side of the property.
you might need to strengthen the pipe where the prongs are attached to it.
mate, I think you may want to consider side thrust on your welds. You have quite a lot of leverage with those long tines. If you try to turn or hit a stump/root that send your machine sideways a bit. No amount of weld will hold it. You may want to consider a brace. Maybe a piece of flat steel 6" x 5/8"(or what ever size you think) welded to the tube between the tines could be an option. Good luck firetrack
Yair . . . As I mentioned up thread this project interests me. Folks in the US always seem to use this style of "root-rake". Would I be correct in saying they are designed to work just below the surface of the soil? This is (I think) normally called a "rock-rake" over here and I have never used one or even seen one pushing sticks. What techniques do you use to actually use a tool like that for clearing? Cheers.
I am by no means an expert; I am making every thing up as I go. I bought a few acres from my neighbor that was last cleared about 100 years ago. They have grown back up with white pine oak and maple. A lot of it over 3’ (1 meter) in diameter. First I brush hogged what I could between the trees. Then I pulled all the dead fall and trash into a pile and burned it. I have been pulling on the big trees with the winch cable while I dig around them with the ripping claw I built for the backhoe. That pulls the tree down and gets the stump out all at once. Then I burn the top and cut the tree for firewood. I plan on farming this land when I am done and don’t want to lose any top soil. I will be leveling it and filling in the stump holes. Then this rake will hopefully break up the roots so they can rot or pull them out of the ground into windrows where I can pile them and burn them. Then I will disc it and plant clover or some cover crop on it for a year and try to plow it. The rake design is pretty random. Mostly just what I have scrounged from the dumpster at work. I angled the tines to try to get them to engage into the ground on there own. I figure the inclined plane of the tines will pull the rake down in, add pressure for traction to the front of the machine, and help roll the roots up out of the ground instead of just breaking them into pieces in the ground. On a side note the land was first farmed and cleared by the Dinsmoor family, one of the sons was Charles Dinsmoor. Who patented the first tracked machine. He sold his patent to Holt manufacturing/Holt Caterpillar Company who merged with Best and in 1925 formed the Caterpillar Tractor Co. its neat to think about him and his impact on the world when I see the old stone piles from the fields that used to be here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dinsmoor
just my humble opinion.....looks like way to much rake or way to little dozer........and way short on support for the rake teeth......but it does look nice
looking mean!! , i will be building one for my wee 4 tonne digger soon, great to get some design ideas, cheers gusbratz
Interesting project. The nearest I've seen to it here would be called a ripper and put behind a tractor, with the idea being that it could jump anything too hard. On the front of a dozer our rocks would do horrible things with that much leverage. That said, I can see the concept and in the right soil those roots are in for a surprise!
Been real busy with everything else lately, hard to find time for this project. I cut some ¾ plate into gussets and welded them on the teeth yesterday. This morning I tacked up the brackets that will hold it to the blade. I Hope to weld them on today and then the mounting lugs on the blade tomorrow. I hope the lugs on the blade don’t cause me any problems when pushing stuff around. I am tempted to change things so the brackets on the blade are L shaped and mount to the top of the blade instead of the face. it would also be quicker to put the rake on because i could drive up under it and pick it up then put the pins in istead of fighting with it like they will be now......
Looks good, good call on the 3pt hitch! Pj
I was wondering about a followup on this thread......how did the root rake work out?
it worked great. better than I could have expected. I dug the stumps with the ripping claw on my backhoe and tried to get as much dirt off as possible to refill the hole. then raked all the roots into a big ditch about 12feet wide by 4 feet deep that was left from poor logging methods of the 1800s. the ditch ran down the center of where I am clearing. sometimes a mat of big roots the size of your leg would bog the machine down to stall point and I would have to lift and push then back up and push again or take light passes. here are links to pics, I will not post anymore because it is a pita to resize them all for this website. http://i1211.photobucket.com/albums.../clearing land/rootrakeing009_zps1849adf3.jpg http://i1211.photobucket.com/albums.../clearing land/rootrakeing007_zps0d962f44.jpg http://i1211.photobucket.com/albums.../clearing land/rootrakeing006_zps8eb7c5b3.jpg http://i1211.photobucket.com/albums.../clearing land/rootrakeing003_zps7160bf0e.jpg http://i1211.photobucket.com/albums...ts/clearing land/motorhome013_zps97fa7b8b.jpg
Thanks for the pics. The reason it is better to post directly to this site is someday your photobucket account will be gone. This thread will be read for years to come and end up with a bunch of broken links to the pics. If you would take the effort to post your pics here rather than some offsite storage site, the pics would be available as long as this sight remains in operation. Hopefully it will go on longer than any of us posting here as this site will always have people who will value it as a great resource. Or perhaps as a source of historical information, how they did things in the OLD days....