Hey guys, been lurking here for years and usually am able to answer any questions I have by searching the forums, but I have finally run into something I can’t find a good answer for so here goes, (this is probably going to be long winded) I have been doing dirt work/excavation work now on the side for about 5 years, in that time iv bought and sold some equipment and grown my little business always using older equipment ( I like old school) and I currently have 4 pieces that I work with, a Peterbilt 359 tandem dump, a John Deere 310d 4wd backhoe, and a Dresser 175c loader, and finally a Dresser Td8g dozer My first dozer was a Dresser Td8e, I loved that machine, it was standard track, fast, powerful and you could grade anything smooth as glass with it, but the dt239 engine is know to be troublesome and you can’t hardly get parts for it, so when I found a TD8g with the Cummins motor and rippers I thought that would be a updgrade that I could keep from now on as I really like Dresser/International equipment, this machine was a wide track machine with the 9’ blade, compared to my e model with a 7’10” blade, but it has been put back with standard 16” pads, which I like because I rarely work in soft ground I tend to do a lot of pad work and driveway installs and genral clearing work where the extra compaction and traction of the narrow pads are better. And it has what looks to be nearly new salt tracks, with new front idlers and top rollers, and sprockets, bottom rollers were reused, can’t tell much about them because of the rock guards but what I can see I can tell they are worn, when I got the machine the blade was bad loose, as was my Td8e so I bought all new pins and bushings and tightened the blade. Now the trouble is I can’t make a smooth spot of dirt with this thing to save me life, loose dirt is okay, but trying to shave hard virgin ground, or shape up a driveway is nearly impossible, it seems like on hard ground the blade is constantly moving up and down with the rhythm of the tracks, and the blade gouges in and starts the washboard, iv tried everything in the world to make it work, slowing to a crawl, just making tiny cuts to where I’m just tickling the dirt, trying to always keep the blade loaded you name it. I have a seasoned operator helping me, he has been running machines for approximately 40 years doing pipe line work and major road construction and says he has never been on anything as hard to run as this, everything iv read the Td8 has a stellar reputation I can’t imagine how it could be this hard to run, especially as nice as my Td8e was, I understand the wide blade machine will be harder than a standard blade to keep from gouging but this is horrible ♂️. Sometimes it seems like my hydraulics are slower than they are supposed to be, like I know I need to be coming up with the blade but it won’t come up fast enough, I was told my hydraulic pump could be wore and not providing enough volume making the spool for the blade control slow to respond, so I replaced the hydraulic pump, no difference. Now the other thing is when I got the machine the front idlers had no shims under them to shim them down against the track frame, and you could see the idlers moving up and down, so I ordered shims and shimmed them down pretty close to tight against the frame, now I’m wondering is the combination of worn rollers and new idlers shimmed down causing a problem? Is my track riding hard on my front idler and then coming back up to my rollers and will this make it hard to grade with? In other words do I need to replace my rollers? Or is this big rant all for nothing?? Am I just imagining problems?? Any help or opinions is much appreciated Thanks
Here is a pic of the machine
Can you change the pitch on the blade as the cutting edge looks well foward , good for cutting new tracks where it is ? Running the rippers over the ground you are going to grade will help to . Easy enough to check your bottom rollers , let you track ajustment go , apply down pressure on your blade and rippers will lift the dozer off the ground . You may have to stack cut tree rings to help . Don't place your hands between the chains and rollers but giving them a poke with a stick to see if the shafts have failed should be easy .
No way to change the angle on the blade. Absolutely ripping is the best solution when you can, you can rip then just push the material off and you can hold it level okay, but when your working on a compacted pad or driveway or something the you just need a few inches off and the rest undisturbed obviously you can’t do that, and that’s where I can’t do anything with it, no matter how easy you are it will grab and pull the blade in, it’s like you know the blade needs to come up but you can’t get it up quick enough, and if you need to go down with the blade the slightest move down and your nose dived again. Yes it’s going in the shop next week and get the rock guards off and have a close inspection of the rollers, I don’t hear any bad noise so I don’t think I have bearings gone but I could be wrong I suppose
The eyes where the blade C frame can get very loose and cause a lot of what you are talking about. Do you have a shims left in the slide plates on the back of the blade. How about the wings those plates ride against. I've seen plenty of the plates welded up and flattened out and then no one touched the wings. The other big place to look is the horizontal pin at the bottom of the blade linkage. Lots of times the bushing gets wallowed out and then the blade face rides up and down in the slack inside that bore. If everything on that end is OK, I would check the blade handle control linkages. Lots of slop in there and it will seem like you are always reacting to late to the movements of the blade.
What John said and Some thoughts : wider blade and dozer did have wide pads so could this mean that the c frame or push frame is longer to miss pads when angled and has got the machine nose heavy , maybe throw something heavy up on the ripper and try grading
John and Hatch - those were my first thoughts as well. Wear and misconfiguration.
Blade has been rebuilt, it is very tight, i also replaced the pins and bushings in the end of the c frame just for reason mentioned. It does seem like the machine is nose heavy so I welded a piece of rail road rail on the back of the ripper bar and stacked 2 sets of old cutting edges on that, and it did “help” some, but it’s far from perfect. Now I have thought about the narrow pads, but I can’t wrap my mind around why the width of the pads would affect how easy/hard it is to keep a level cut?? Can you explain more? And yes the blade lever does have slop and I have worked on that but the parts are no longer available and re drilling to bigger holes helped but now I’m back to sloppy again, I will address that again in the near future but I don’t think that’s my whole problem
Got the machine in the shop yesterday to do a service on it, so while it was there went ahead and pulled the rock guards off to have a better look at the rollers, with the machine sitting on concrete the track chain is not even touching the front 2 rollers on either side, matter of fact you could put your fingers between the first roller and the rail if you wanted, so I went ahead and order all 10 bottom rollers, going to put them on as soon as they arrive and report back. Does anybody think this will affect how the machine operates/holds grade? I would think it would but this is new territory to me............
Take a couple of pics of the rollers and post them.
Are the roller flanges hitting the track link bosses on the rest of the rollers?
No they are not hitting the link bosses yet, but the rails appear to be pretty much new and are nice and thick, they still had paint on them when I got the machine. It appears that the front two are wore worse than the ones in back, maybe from the machine being front heavy from having the wide blade? And someone replaced the front idler and now with a thick idler it’s holding the rail down lower than the front rollers? I will post pics tomorrow night when I get to the shop
yes the front couple of rollers take the most abuse in any track setup, and it is going to rock forward as it rolls off the tall idler into that void of the worn roller area. It is possible that the idler is shimmed down to cause this, but that is unlikely.
Sounds like someone threw on a set of chains and didn't touch the rollers at all. You might check on if the idlers can be installed in a high or low position. I remember that on Cats but don't recall if it is the same on the corn binders.
Yes I have the idler shimmed down at the moment, I did it out of ignorance, when I got the machine I noticed the front idlers moving up and down a lot, so after some investigation I realized they did not have any shims under them at all, someone had just bolted the wear strips up under there without shims causing a big gap between the wear strip and the track frame, so I ordered shims and shimmed it down to tighten up the gap and to stop the idler from moving up and down Now I’m thinking that the reason there where no shims was when someone replaced the front idler the had to leave out all the shims to allow the idler to move up to account for the bottom rollers being wore.............maybe I am off track myself tho.......we shall see
With Rails loose and rollers being swapped look also to the Rail Truck mountings, make sure these are not 'loosened' up where they too are moving to a reasonable excess as that will also come into play. Any and all play from blade mounts and supports or cylinder attachment points to trucks idlers and and rollers all add up to large movements at blade edge.
Could you explain “rail truck mountings” ?
Clearing land I do OK. Finish grading I've never been as good as I want to be. This day was about over, I smoothed out the track best I could. Along the edge was clumps of torn sod, and all the traffic pushes moist sand up raising the sod close to the track. My friend Kenny climbed aboard. He'd run a TD7E since childhood. He began with the edge of the blade about 3 feet into the sod that looked good already, said he needed to cut it down to where it had been in the morning. He runs the blade angled & holds one end of the blade on soil he wants to match. Clumps of sod were his biggest challenge. Very soon he had it flat. Grade is easier with processed material. Roots, sod, rocks will ruin a grading attempt. Not having run your tractor I flinch at the width of your blade. Keeping it level is going to be tough! Might be easier in a parking lot, but over terrain seems tough to level. I'd think just wide enough to see the corners of the blade from the seat.
Width of the wide pads kept the tractor more nearly level. 9' seems wide for a standard track machine. Blade must extend 18" past the track line.
The new bottom rollers and shimming the idlers correctly will/ should make a dramatic difference in carrying a finish grade. In hard material I used to move the dozer over on each pass 1/2 of a blade width. Keeping one track on a near perfect finish grade really helps. I only mention this because there will novices reading this thread and hopefully it will help them. I never ran a TD8, but I did spend some time on a angle blade TD7E. It was a nice tractor for grading ditches.
The track frames are set out wider than a standard track Machine, the blade does stick out wider than the tracks but not by 18” on each side. No doubt in hindsight a narrow machine is much better than a wide one for finishing and grading, I have learned that. Yes that is the best way is to run part of the blade on something that is already leveled and smooth and let the other side cut
Willie B I like your sled and please more pics of the little dozer in the background
This is the method I use to train new operators to hold grade. It works for both cutting and filling. Also works for dozers, track loaders and CTLS. The 1/2 pass method allows one track frame to stay on the desired grade at all times. If the operator has the bubble in their arse then they can feel when the machine gets off grade.
Angling the blade helps immensely sometimes when the blade hop starts. Making a second pass at angle from the first pass helps also. Angle blade dozers have to have a wide blade so that when the blade is at it's utmost amount of angle, the outside of the tracks are still within the blade cutting width. The more material in front of the blade the better it is to prevent the blade from hopping. I hated narrow tracked dozers. I had to run a narrow tracked D6R and it hated me more than I hated it.
The one in the background belongs to a lady friend. Only child of the only child of a John Deere dealer. I don't think she was born when the crawler was built, but it has never left her family. Her husband built the power angle for the blade. He graded about 20 acres with it last summer. I pushed the stumps & boulders, gave it a vague shape with my TD7G, he took over from there.
Tinker so you prefer wider pads to narrow ones? Yes on this one you have to run the blade at some angle pretty much all the time to try and trim something to grade, unless your just bulk pushing dirt
There is the base design 'Pivot' Mount just ahead of the Drive Sprocket, then will be a cross tractor cross member attached to Both rail trucks(Undercarriage Frames) play here is impossible to counter for as the trucks will move independent of each other and the tractor base frame.
Yes , I prefer wide tracks. 1000 times yes ! Only for finish grade, especially on slopes. Doesn't matter if it is sub-grading them or spreading black dirt. LPG's will go on slopes in terrible conditions. Even in decent material the LPG can turn quite fast and not tear up your work. Some slope work required a D6 to get decent production. The size (area) determined if a D6 was a better choice. For smaller ditches and smaller slopes I was in hog heaven on a John Deere 450 (any series). 6 way blades also increased an operators production per hour. If the blade could only be angled it would be like being in a fist fight with one hand tied behind your back ! The contractor I spent most of my career with didn't buy any wide tracked dozers without a 6 way blade. Cutting bigger slopes such as following scrapers required a D8 to be able to keep up with them. Sorry for being long winded post, but after running dozers for about 30 years I could go on and about running them.
Don’t Tinkerer don’t be ashamed of being long winded, the knowledge is appreciated. You may be changing my mind here to the width of pad, I have always assumed the narrower the better unless you couldn’t stay afloat, down here in bama we have the most diverse soil conditions you could imagine, less than a mile from me is “flat woods gumbo” that you can sink to China in, less than 10 miles in the other direction is Sand Mountain, and here in my valley we have Chert pits, and everything from solid rock sticking out of the ground to low pasture land with topsoil, but I use the little td8 for everything, a lot that I need a big dozer for, so I assumed that the narrow pads would give the most “hook up” under most conditions, and give me the most out of a small dozer as far as pushing, not to mention compaction for driveway and pad work where I need to crunch chert rocks in
Here is a pic of the front rollers, not good pics but best I could manage in the shop
Set the machine down so the rollers are on the links and then take a picture where a roller flange is directly over a track pin boss. The rollers in the photo don’t look that bad.
The machine is sitting down
Then there is another problem Those photos show a near new roller by flange and face. Incorrect but still IH idlers sitting too tall to the running gear Close enough to appear correct but still wrong. Sitting on solid surface idler should not be carrying weight rails should not weight bear contact surface until the first roller.
I would like to see a photo of the rest of the bottom rollers in relation to flanges and the track pin bosses. I think DMiller is correct but I'm interested in looking at the track frame as a whole.
I will get more pics tonight at the shop and post them
why does the inside of the roller surface show a contact pattern and the outside show none? or is it just me not seeing it right? the rollers should show an even contact pattern on the inside and the outside load carrying surfaces. maybe its there and i'm not seeing it
That's what it looks like to me plus the rails are running hard towards that sides flange. Also looks like that roller is close to 100% worn. When you get to machine could you post pictures of front idler and mounts and back of blade show pins and mounts. Thanks Bob
No curvature wear as typical to the roller faces, Flanges do not appear to have been 'Dressed' and are about correct height as I can see them.
Rollers were removed this evening, pic overload coming.........
Front idler flange height measuring 0.60 (new) Top roller diameter measuring 6.00 (new) Bottom rollers measuring 6.85-6.75 20%-0% life Idk if this is my problem but I don’t think new rollers will hurt anything except my wallet. The book tells to shim the front idler wear plates to .06 and that is all, so they want the idler pretty much down on the track frame, but there is no procedure that I can find center the front idler to the sprocket? It has shims on each side under the “thrust plates” I believe the book calls them, but the only instructions I see are to put the shims back like you found them? It looks like at the moment the shims are split, the same amount on both sides, but should I be checking to see if that has it in line with the sprocket? And if so how to I go about doing that?
I'm listening...
stringline under the bottom from sprocket to idler and then over the top if the carrier rollers on this model are adjustable to adjust them and measure center of sprockets side to side and center of idlers side to side measurements should be the same this last should be done after making sure the roller frame pivots are tight to keep it from toeing in and out. Question someone else might know a long track has 6 bottom rollers and wouldn't a lgp have 6 also
Thought someone might have put standard frames on it
Hatch I know what you mean thinking the lgp would have 6 rollers but i don’t believe it does, I think they came in a standard track, wide track, and lgp, then long track, and the long track is the only 6 roller frame, the others are just different pad widths, with the wide track and lgp having the wider crossbar and dead axel to move the frames out for the pads to clear. Somebody feel to correct me if I’m wrong on this
Just thought the low ground pressure as wide and long
Did someone mention TD8G LGP ? Count the rollers if you can !
6
W Well...........I count 6..........now what’s the difference between a wide track and lgp? Or are they the same thing
Long track was for better grading and wide was flotation and if I remembered correctly that was wide and long
This is what I have, except somebody put mine back with 16” pads instead of the 22”
In my world they are the same thing. But the only way to know about JD's TD8g would be in an OEM parts book.
Well that sure looks like 5
Well now 4 track options who woulda thunk
Yeah I wish it was long track so bad...........*sigh*
Might see if you can find some long frames from salvage yard , Blount down in Ga. is pretty good on the IH and Dressers
Boy you sure like doing under carriage the hard way. I'm getting old enough I don't like crawling under little tractors so I jack the tractor up ,split the track and take the track frame off. Turn the track frame over and set it on heavy steel saw horses, much easier to work on. When you put the new rollers on you can center the front idler. When you put the track frame back on you center the drive sprocket to the back roller. Looks like you have too many shims in the idler wear strips. Good luck Bob
It does look like someone swapped a new set of chains onto the old rollers but you have a long way to go on the those rollers as well. There is plenty of space between the roller flanges and the track pin bosses. The chains that you have on there though will last a lot longer if you do install the new rollers. The rails will be riding on flat surfaces instead of in the grooves of the old one. I've had to do rollers that way when I didn't have something to lift the track frames with. It's no fun. I don't recall if the frames have to come off to change the sprockets.
Based on the photo I stand behind the Incorrect Idlers Track should not go Uphill from sprockets to idlers idlers have always been smaller Diameter to sprockets even just glancing at a machine
The idlers are berco, I’m going to have my parts man cross the number on them today and see if I can find out if they are correct or not
It is interesting that the factory brochure advises purchasing the Long Track for grading. Sadly, JohnDeere2240 you are fighting an uphill battle for finish grading. I experienced the same problem with a short track dozer to. It was quite frustrating to run a dozer that was impossible to avoid that dreaded blade hop. Dam, I hated that dozer !
Tinkerer is too humble. He's got a lot of time on dozers. I would think loose pins and such on the blade would also contribute to blade hop.
Rollers came in today, going to try and get them on tomorrow, center the idler and top roller and shim the wear bars to book spec. Was able to confirm that my front idlers are correct, they measure right at 23 1/2 inches flange to flange which is exactly what the book says they should. Still have some other things to take care of while it’s in the shop, water pump is weeping, so going to replace that, and a oil cooler line is leaking at a fitting so that will be addressed, and before it leaves I’m going to try and get the pins out off the crossbar and see what they look like, I believe they will be worn, they will probably get built back up and ground down, and the holes they come through will probably get some welding and grinding work done so that the pin will go back through tight and take any slop out that there is there. Blade is as tight as new, took care of that last year. Then lastly I have 2 track adjuster seal kits coming, I have one that leaks down slowly so I will probably go ahead and re seal then while it’s in the shop, does anybody have any suggestions on how to split the track so that it is easiest to put back together? They are the split link type, (alligator link) I have only done one other and we did it just behind the front idler, is that the best location to have it split at?
Y Yes I agree Tinkerer, it’s probably a up hill battle, and the reason I’m in this battle is probably a combination of being young, dumb, and stubborn. The next dozer I buy will be a long track, I’m coming to the conclusion that the track on the ground always need to be longer than the blade is wide, I could be wrong but i thing that after the G series they went to 6 rollers on the bottom, probably just for the reason that they are so much better to run, I know that when they went to Komatsu the 37 and 39s are 6 roller tractors, I have probably already gone to far fighting this one, but I have to much money in it to sell and start over at the moment, so I’m hoping that with getting the undercarriage in good shape, taking the slop out of the blade handle and crossbar pins that maybe I can get enough performance out of it to be able to keep it a couple of years and work some of my money out of it then move this machine to a backup, but we shall see The moral of the story is I should have been on the forum asking advice before I purchased it, I hope other people reading this will learn and not repeat my mistakes
Clearly, you won't know until you make repairs. After that, I've found finish work I like to do backwards. It isn't good for the tracks, but it isn't heavy work, and I pull downhill whenever possible. I spend time imagining the perfect drag to smooth out the surface lawnmower smooth. Harley Rakes seem out of my price range. I just bought a 10' York Rake with gauge wheels, haven't tried it yet.
Back blading looser material can make things look a lot better. That's one of the reasons dozers, loaders and skid steers have float position. A lot of operators never use it but if you have it... try it.
I'm curious as to how much looseness is in the crossbar.
Ran into a similar problem with a 39 kamatsu ,the blade was so far out from the track so you could angle the blade without hitting the track .that the blade would jump up and down like running over boulders when just traveling.
Did y Did you find any solution? Or just learn to deal with it?
Keeping blade angled helped some ,just got to deal with.
Have you considered removable shoes? Think of a wood plane. If you took a razor sharp plane iron, just pushed it straight into the wood, results would not be good. Mount that same plane iron in a flat sole, it works much better. In mortice & tennon joinery you use a chisel with one face flat. You lay the flat side on the surface you want to fine tune, it stops the blade from cutting too deep. I have toyed with the notion of a flat surface laying behind the cutting edge
Back dragging takes the marks out, and makes it look pretty, but an old tractor mane once told me that if a dozer was made to back drag, it would have a cutting edge on the back of the blade. I do it myself, but it does wear the bottom of the blade.
Cutting edges are cheap. Undercarriages are NOT. Lots of dynamics in backing up, chains & sprockets wear rapidly backing up. I'm not suggesting doing the job backward, only the last few passes.
Oh I back drag myself a lot. One company I worked for, and that's where the old fella told me not to do it, if you got caught back dragging with a U blade, you got your walkin papers. As a grader operator, I prefer using a tractor with an angle blade over a strait push. I notice a lot of dozer men, run the grader with the MB in a strait position.
I do back drag if for some reason I need to leave something perfectly smooth like dressing top soil in a yard, it works on loose material but what I have found that on something that is going to be compacted, like a building pad or a driveway, if you washboard it going forward, then backdrag it smooth when you pack it every ripple and bump you put in it going forward will show, in other words compacted material has to be cut smooth to be smooth
Made a little progress today, engine is serviced, got the water pump replaced, looks like last time it was done somebody attempted to put the pump back in without the gasket, in doing so they used a liberal amount of the red Silicone, pump was leaking around the bottom sealing surface, replaced with a new, not reman pump, I have had to many troubles out of reman parts in times past. Then we got on to resealing track adjusters, the one on the right side has never worked, track tension has been close to where it needed to be, but when I had tried to tighten it up it would not take grease, replaced grease zerk, still no go, the left side has always leaked down slowly. Both sides came apart easy, had track spilt and idler fork out in about 15 minutes per side, but that’s where the fun begin, right side piston was froze in the tube, tried break clean, then penetrating lube, then screwing in a slide hammer ( which the book does not tell you about, the back of the piston has a threaded hole, 9/16 I believe, all the book says is remove piston) but it was stuck hard, then tried heating the tube with the torch to melt the hardened grease then pulling with a nut screwed down the piece of all thread while hitting with the slide hammer, still no go, so as a last ditch effort we took the slide hammer off, cut the all thread, and put the impact wrench on the nut on the remaining all thread and hammered away trying to pull the piston out, and of course the all thread broke, so that was 2 hrs of the morning wasted. So after throwing all that in the scrap pile and just being resolved to buying a new idler fork and piston we went to the other side, screwed the slide hammer into the back of the piston and a few bumps and out she came, a few minutes of cleaning and pressing a new seal on, and that side is sitting on the floor ready to go. With the tracks broke, the out side crossbar pins are easy to get at, I had about decided to leave them alone but after seeing how much room there is to work around them now, and with having to wait on parts this week since we need a new idler fork and piston, we went ahead and removed one of the pins, the out side collar that the pins go through had approximately 1/8 to 1/4” of slop, I have already found a piece of heavy wall pipe, I’m going to cut the collars off and make new ones that will hold the pin tight, and order new pins, and weld the new collars on, probably will take into next weekend to get this done but that should have everything as tight and as close to new as I can get.
I sure hope repairing your mechanical issues clears up your problem. Few operators I know can perfect finish grading with a short 5 roller crawler. My sense is the short track, combined with the long C frame & the extreme rake in the cutting edge makes these less than ideal to cut a perfect surface. The tractor is like a boat in rough sea as it climbs each bump the blade rises. As you pass center of gravity the blade dives. Continuing makes the problem grow. Correcting the blade height helps, but I am only quick enough when moving very slow. Very short pushes can help a lot. Start on flat ground, expand the size of the flat. First time you feel it dig back up. I don't know anyone able to make a perfect surface on mixed soil. Little stumps, rocks, roots, even clumps of sod will hamper your efforts. Last weekend I expanded a clearing I had made earlier. This area is known as "The Lower Meadow" When I was a kid it was a typical Vermont hay field, rolling hills, humps, and the occasional boulder they must have mowed around. These days it's grown up to scrubby 18" diameter White Pine. A small tornado a few decades ago knocked down 100 of these pine, small swamp Maple grew in their place. My clearing efforts left the ground shaped as desired, but it'd be a wild ride on a lawnmower! I'm going to try the York rake to smooth it out.
Willie B, I hope that what I am doing helps, I’m not expecting a miracle, but I would like to get this machine to preform close to what my previous Td8e did, I could do very satisfactory work with it, I understand that the wider blade is going to make it more difficult, but the way this machine acts is past difficult, that has been what has weighed on my mind the most is how can something so similar be so different, and if it acted like this when it was new who would buy something like this?
As I said I have no familiarity with your specific machine. Friends (elderly brothers) have two TD7E. Both machines are heavily worn. Mine is TD7G, virtually identical but for Cummins. Mine is very tight. Any member of that whole family can climb on any of the three tractors and lay down a layer of crushed stone 1" thick in a driveway, or processed topsoil on a lawn. They routinely prepare house sites smooth as a golf course preparing for topsoil. They are NOT smoothing out mixed dire full of rocks or roots, clumps of torn up sod. I don't do nearly as well. I hate to say it, skill doesn't come easily.
Sod or grass clumps are the absolute worst especially with a skid steer. Did a job once for a horse guy (almost forced to do) and he wanted sod filled dirt and manure leveled flat like for a lawn. Not going to happen.
Need a rototiller to get those to smooth down.
The width of the blade has no relevance to the hop situation. IMHO ! Roto-tillers are good as Dave pointed out. But, a harley rake is the absolute perfect attachment for flower bed type finish grade. Especially on a skid steer. They remove sticks and rocks as good as a hand rake. A good operator can fill in low spots as if they were never there.
Harley rake is nice if you can afford it. Good topsoil I could level really nice. I always back bladed so no tire marks. Usually was getting sod put down. Some operators/people think that's the sign of a not so good operator because they could level everything going forward. Maybe with a dozer on something that isn't critical if there's track marks in it? Skid steer is instant reverse so not a big deal forward or reverse.
The trouble with sod clumps and sticks is having to deal with them even after a rake gathers them up for you. It's like you have to have a perpetual hole somewhere on your property to toss the stuff, and it has to be somewhere that you don't care if it settles a little bit over time
I have three dumps. Only organic material goes in. Always a steep "cliff" If it rots & settles more room for more. I can drive the crawler on them. I have tried burning stumps, but the process is full of red tape. You schedule your fire. If everything is too wet to burn (VT) your permit expires with no fire. They won't issue a permit unless it has rained three days in a row, but if it has rained three days in a row, good luck getting it to burn. Just easier to shove it off a steep hill. My grandchildren will call it compost.
Your front idler runs on a track with shims to correct for wear. At 3500 hours mine were spanked. I priced new, they were in the $1000 range. I made my own swopping hours for dollars.
Progress has been made, new rollers are on, track adjusters resealed/replaced, and all 3 crossbar pins replaced, ordered a new pivot shaft for the blade handle and that took some slop out of the handle. So after re assembly took it out back to the only place we had at the shop to do any playing, and as I was tracking across the parking lot the first thing I noticed was no more blade hop! It tracks smooth, no more chug chug chug as your tracking on hard ground, the blade is not moving at all! So went out back and scraped off some topsoil, and got down to the clay and I could tell a big difference in how much more control I had over the blade, I had no problem making a cut and keeping it smooth, I could also run the side of the blade into a pile of dirt without the tractor wanting to nose down, it will just load up and carry on level. So, I just hope I haven’t imagined all this, loaded up and moved to a job today but it’s just a clearing job pushing some brush and small trees, so probably won’t be able to get a full impression of the changes yet, but next week we move to a driveway job and that will tell the tale..............I will report back as soon as we do