DIY Farm Impliments
 

I figure it's best to start a clean thread on this build we talked about in Math Help
Got many ideas and just scribbled them down and flopped back on the couch. I'm finally getting over this cold and I detected a trickle on energy yesterday so I've started the build of this critter.

I decided to go with a couple of rusted up drive shafts from something I scraped.
This will be the eccentric or crank, or whatever to shake things. After watching those video's I posted, I decided that the stroke will be what ever it is, I can't see a problem if they manufacture something like that.

Yesterday I hammered together the A frame, and today I tack welded the bearing box into place. This is all leftovers and scrap so it ain't pretty.
y next job is to mount the blade in the mill and sharpen an edge, then I'll tack weld it to the side bars and see how it looks.
I had given some thought to using some tie rod ends from a 12,000lb steering axle for the crank ends and the end on the blade lever, but not having a spare to push into a hole in the plate to swage the taper in, and not knowing how they would last in rotary motion killed the idea. Pressing is the only way I have at hand to do a short taper.

Pic 1 is a similar driveline in the way I will use it
Pic 2 is showing what is done
#3 and 4 is self explanatory as to what the U joint will do
So this is it, at the moment, If I have a good day tomorrow, I'll report more.

This isn't what I'd imagined from your sketches. A picture really is worth a thousand words.

I like the bearing arrangement a lot. Not so much the big overhang at the crank though...

Having a job I want to do usually trumps health issues. Good luck there.

The crank overhang is the only way I could think of to create a bearing of sufficient strength, and as usual all things are subject to rebuild and modification. The more I look at videos, like Camdiggers latest, the more I realize there is not that much power required and my tendency to overbuild 300% is not necessary.

Anyhow, off to the shop to see if I can clamp the blade to the table and mill a cutting edge.

Lookin good....

That reminds me of the mechanic that made the brakes so strong he broke the suspension loose. It makes it easy to find the weak links. ;)

You are playing a game I enjoy all the time, which is making use of spare parts and good "junk" that is currently taking up both physical space, and space in my mental inventory.

I managed to clamp the T1 plate at an angle on the mill table and it made a surprisingly easy job of putting an edge onto it. Then I cut and tacked the vertical bars to the blade and a piece of 2x2x1/4" wall box tube to the top of it.
I ran out of juice and quit till tomorrow, but I'm thinking about how to do the next step, which will be attaching the blade.

I know I am missing something, just have to wait and see what you come up with. How is the slip yoke not going to slip?

The slip yoke was rusted solid and even red hot would not move, same as the one in my first picture. So I cut it off, and will weld a piece of pipe onto it as a con rod.
I'm thinking I may be able to whack off a piece of the other driveline with the U joint and use that pipe as the con rod, one I figure the length..

I also see that I should have quit while I was ahead yesterday as I tack welded the knife blade upside down, and will have to cut the little welds and flip it over before final welding. I'll leave it for now and work on the pivot points.

Just to clarify the project in my mind, you are basically building a shaking noble plow except the the blade is supported on the ends as opposed to the middle correct

Noble plows I've seen typically have swept blades like a back wards duck foot. Gerry's bed lifter blade is straight across. Gerry's might cut 4-8" deep while most cultivators like the Noble plow rarely cut more than 5".

yup, that's right. Not a V blade.
It passes under the plant root system and cuts, it so pick and pull is easy. I'm planning on a 6" depth, with that 22 inches distance that Bill figured on.
I'm having all kinds of drive system ideas popping up on yootoobe all of a sudden.
This is a picture of the drive creation I'm trying to do. sort of, the top will be another U joint.

Beautiful little machine. That's quite the field for that little tractor.

Would you consider your garden to be a raised bed like in the video?

My tractor is a Kubota of similar size, but not 4wd. If it was, I would probably just use brute force to drag a cutter under the plants like I have been doing for years. The change this year is because we has increased the bed width to 36" from 21" At 21 we were on the edge of traction with the diff lock on, so I am not going to pull a dead knife and hope it works.
Thus the powered undercutter is born or hatched.
We do not have quite a raised bed.The pathways get sort of pounded down and so the plant area is a bit higher. A raised bed is not the issue, digging 8000 garlic by hand is. This plant, unlike an onion has a root system up to 48 inches and is quite determined to stay where it is.

I know Bountyhunter is growing garlic with a raised bed system, he is in a very wet area and it makes sense there.

Here is spring pictures of the two garlic beds, you can barely see a rise in the plant area, but after walking on the path does pack the paths down.
And the new way of planting and why the need for a wider undercutter.

So is that black plastic sheet with holes for the plants? Is the sheet to cut down on weeds/ other plants growing mostly?

When you go to harvest, do you remove the sheet separately, then dig the garlic?


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Yes to both questions. We are getting old and this is what we are trying to do to reduce the weeding labor. It has to reduce weeding and hold more moisture, I think. I would like to have a sickle bar mower off the tractor to cut off tops, before lifting the ground cloth, but it may be just me worrying too much. We should be able to lift it with 2 people and roll it up and then do the undercut.
I have not used this idea before, but I put up pictures to answer Arizionian, because you can see the bed is higher.

I live about 50 miles from a place called Gilroy which is probably the garlic capital of the known universe.

I have never seen it grown under perforated plastic like this but because of the drought situation here I am sure we are going to see more of this type of farming.

There’s a lot of target irrigation and drip irrigation and greenhouse growing going on.

All I irrigate is my redwood trees and my ornamental lawn and shrubberies. I irrigate a lot of it with used water from raising tropical fish.

I had a friend here that wanted to start a sort of hydroponic plant and tilapia farm here in the San Joaquin. For a little while the idea of being a scientific gentleman Farmer appealed to me, but the guy turned out to be a flake and the whole business went belly up before I got any money involved.

My wife was raised in farm country and while she gardens like a madman she will not grow anything edible. She had to do stuff like pluck chickens and cook tortillas when she was a kid and so nowadays she doesn’t even want to touch a piece of meat. I have to do all the butchering and most of the cooking myself.

LOL Judging by the size of azaleas I can grow on poopy fishwater, I think that all this expensive fish food I’m feeding would turn into some very nice vegetables.

Actually it is only a drop in a bucket. China produces 80% of the world garlic supply at 23 million tons. Looking at the quality and flavor of the slant product, the market for good garlic is unlimited.

About 10yrs ago we took a fieldtrip with 4H to a local jail where the female inmates get to work in a greenhouse hydroponic facility. We had to get buzzed in through several doors to get to the garden. They were growing lettuce and raising tilapia simultaneously, both of which were eaten by inmates once harvested.

In a nutshell, water from the tilapia tanks is pumped up into "gutters" with a lid with holes in it for the lettuce. In one side of the gutter and out the other. There were several tanks with tilapia in various stages of development. I'd say the tanks were 20' across and 3-4' high. The poop in the water from the tilapia provides nutrients for the lettuce. There were some other minor crops like flowers and such but primarily lettuce. LINK

Chinese garlic is unknown here. You will never see it for sale. Probably has import restrictions too, but our market is 100% California garlic.

Down here in the sunny south they grow lots of things under plastic.
Watermelons,tomatos and i'm sure other stuff.
What i have seen from the road is solid sheets,no holes preformed.
And from what i hear and see,theres water tubes in the plastic,each end is attached to an irrigation pipe.
So water is under the plastic.
They set plants as i guess you do,the field workers just poke holes in it and set the plants in place,they ride on a seat thing behind the tractor with the plants at hand.

Your plastic looks thicker/heavier than what they use here.
They put the plastic down with a tractor too,a roller thing rolls it out and they roll dirt over each side to bed it in place.

After they pick the crops they come back in and remove the plastic,and the cages the tomatos grow in and the stakes used to hold it all up.
Huge work,or so it looks to me.

The tomato crop is used for fast food,Wendy's,mcdonalds etc.
They pick everything,then grade it by size in a grid like grading gravel,the proper size goes to market and the rest gets hauled back to the fields where they burst them all and plow them back into the dirt,a huge huge waste of tomatos.

But you guys probably know all of this.

Randy, we looked at that, and the plastic layer machine is around 2500, and needs a bigger tractor than we have. And plastic has to be disposed of. It is supposed to disintegrate after 12 months if you plow it in. It is a good system for large truck farm operations, but garlic is a different beast and the plastic has to last over winter for us.
We are using ground cloth plastic which should be good for 10-20 years, just roll it up when the job is done. We got it in 100 ft rolls and I made an aluminum plate with holes drilled in it and we use a propane torch to burn the holes.
Instead of using weights to hold down the plastic, I may design a machine to roll dirt over the edges to hold it down from the wind. So far this works, time will tell.
This plastic allows water to flow through it at up to 20 liter a munutte so our current irrigation system will work.

Gerry, I'd looked into mulch layers, etc, several years ago and decided I had a few hundred OTHER projects that should be done first (or instead of :=) - the $8k versions (and probably lower) use another pair of disks to cover the edges (as you probably already have thought of)

https://www.elitemetaltools.com/site...?itok=6KzfnxMy

Link should pull up a pic, I'm in the same boat as you for tractor size - that one wants around 80 horse tractor, I haven't figured out a way to run BOTH of my 45 horse ones in tandem :rolleyes: ... Steve

Ahh,you make the holes,interesting.
Cleaning up the plastic looks to be a chore,i'm not sure how they do that,the tomato plants are big and they are in cages,with a big stick holding the cages up.
I would think that the sticks are 6-8 feet long,the cages are 6 feet tall maybe.
All of that has to be pulled up and saved for next season.
I think they plow the whole field with the plastic in the ground,then pick the plastic up.
They do not leave it,i see big piles of the plastic along the roads.
I am not a farmer,but i can appricate the technology and equipment.
The corn crop is planted so close together that theres no weeds,corn,cotton and tomatos and peanuts are grown here.

Today I got back at it.
I'll call this the Oscillating frame. I got it tacked together and all straight and bracked it where I don't want deflection. Then I laid some wire on it.
I got some pimples to remove at some point when I clean up.

So after stripping off the bracing, I had more than is in pictures, I began to fit it to the tractor.
It actually went on like it's supposed to.
As some of these guys use rubber mounts, I figure the motion ain't much, so I used 3/4" bolts for the pivot points. I' will drill the bolts for a grease nipple afterwards.
And Caddman and Arizonian, I almost made it, I am at 21 inches from pivot to blade.:)

So, next is to chop a brand new PTO driveline shorter for the job, and swap out one end. It has the 6 spline ends on both ends and I need to go to 1" keyed shaft on one end.
And complete the crank mechanism. This better not take to much as I have used every piece of 1/2 and 3/4" bits that have been lurking about, and even had to cut a bit of plate to make the blade arms.
So, as tomorrow is a town day, shop life will resume in a couple days.

Looking good, can't wait to see the end results.

Looking good!!!

Keep up the good work.


I never knew they made a 2wd kubota.[emoji4]


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I wish it was 4wd but I have not experienced a need for more traction, unless undercutting, and that may be helped if I put fluid into the tires.
I'm convinced the power driven knife is going to make a pile of difference.

The tractor is actually a L185 and in North America L1501
It has 4 speeds on the PTO box and 8 on the main box and down on the side there is a crawler gear that puts it down to less than walking speed. Plus a dif lock. Perfect for row crops

I remember riding a new Kubota in 1979. I was a Teamster working for a tractor etc rental company.

Those babies would do a nice slow wheelie and you could ride it down the lot.

They all got nose weights pronto.

Yup, I got 135lb steel block hanging off the front:)

I don't know much else about them except I was told never to put water in the front tires. The steering knuckles can't take the inertia of such heavy wheels if you smack a rock or something.

My understanding of weighted wheels is that the weight has little to do with the tractor as the tractor is not carrying the weight. It is born by the tires only.
That has always appealed to me rather than the concrete block 3 point hitch arrangement.
The front wheels of this little critter already have factory cast iron weights on them. I can't see the percentage on liquid in the front tires, I doubt if they would hold more than a gallon.
I have been toying with the thought of getting beetjuice in the rear tires. The machine is 1600 lb at present.
In the US this would be considered a "grey market" tractor as it was imported and bypassed US regs. We don't have this as the court judgement in the US does not affect us.
If it went through the US dealers, it would have only 2 pto speeds, that is the quick identifier here.

So I tacked everything in place and rotated it by hand.
I've let it stew in my head overnight, and I've come to the conclusion I need to redo the crank mechanism, as the stroke is way to ridiculous.

So, back to re-figuring that one.

OOOHHH. R1 begins. It always works that way when doing complicated mechanisms.

Yes, everything else works out but I found this home made rig and it's in line with what I'm doing, but look at the crank difference.:eek:

Looks like more of a vibration than cutting.:)

Josh was telling me about a new to him toy he borrowed from another city department. To run wire to sprinklers on the golf course that were never wired into the system and have to be manually controlled. It's a "Vibratory Plow"? I think that's what he called it. It makes a slit trench and drags the wires to where you want them. He can control 95+% of the irrigation on the Indian Peaks golf course with his I-Pad. Wiring in the stragglers will make it 100%.

I was thinking vibration would do it,but i have never cut garlic and never seen a machine like that.
I have seen the wire vibrator thing,my buddy built one with a hydraulic motor on it with a counter weight on the motors shaft,it worked well.

Vibration would probably do it. I have noted in using the present undercutter, that roots tend to wrap around the blade and often increase the effort to pull it. I clean the knife at the end of the row. Some of the roots are garlic, poplar siphoning nutrients from the garden, and weed roots.
I feel that a back and forth motion, like wiping your feet, will help clear the blade.

Did you get the ripper we discussed to deal with the poplar roots built?