jacobweaver32 said:
What do I do to offset the dizzyness?
Seriously though that is an interesting idea... I just hope the great results exceed the neighbors laughter.
Once you get dizzy turn the other way and do circles to unwind.
I have spent the majority of my 460 tractor hours with the boxblade on using it for grading large areas. Before that I spent hundreds of hours with a small bulldozer and 6-way blade. In many ways the dozer and boxscraper are similar in function.
My boxblade is in the lighter 400 or so lb range, made by Frontier, and 5 feet wide. It works without extra weight most of the time. I needed to grade off a big hard pan knob this year that the unweighted boxblade would only just scratch. So I got my subsoiler thinking it was just too tight and it would also just scratch. It made perfect sense to me that the blade was just scraping the surface and needed more weight. I had tried everything such as angle changes and scarifier position changes along with totally removing the scarifiers. I had some chunks of railroad steel adding up to about 150 lbs that I was going to put on but then I saw my barrels. I have a couple of 55 gallon plastic barrels that I used for water storage. Hmmmm, I strapped one barrel on top of the boxblade and then filled it with water. Yeah baby, 400 lbs of
ballast on top of the 400 lb box. That box with scarifiers in the middle position took that hardpan and moved it like sand. The whole operation was quieter with less rattling from the box bouncing and the material was easily moved. My 3ph can lift some 1700 lbs so the weight was no issue.
I am now a firm believer in using additional weight on a blade for more effective cutting in hard material.
You must constantly look over your right shoulder with your right hand on the 3ph control when you are doing finish grading. I have a serious tan on one side of my neck from this. After a long day of grading I need to lean my head onto my left shoulder to try and even out.
Oh and to get a smooth surface you almost have to grade in more than one direction. Big learning curve and you get no useful benefit from going fast. You can creep along and grade just fine.