Front-End Loader Anyone attach a rock rake to a FEL???

[jkade72]

I bought a 5' landscape rake to go behind my bx2350 and got to looking and I think I can mount it to the bucket on the fel with a few holes drilled in it. The reason I want to do this is so all the limbs and sticks don't pile up behind the tractor a go to poking everthing. The rake I have has one bolt that bolts the rake to the frame that attaches to the 3pt hitch part of it and has abount 2 feet of angle iron that has the plate that you can use to angle it and turn it around backwards. If I take the bolt out I will have about 2 feet of iron that I can drill a couple of holes in and then drill in my bucket and mount it on the front of the tractor. What do you think, will it work?
Thanks

 

[RonMar]

You may have trouble controlling the ammount of downforce applied to the rake. If not in float, as the tractor wheels roll up and down over obstructions, the tines attached to the loader bucket will alternately dig into the ground with the weight of the tractor front end, and leave the surface. If you put the loader in float, all the loader weight will be aplied to the tines which is probably too much weight. On the 3PH with only the weight of the rake frame to carry in float, the tines can still dig in pretty agressively.

It might work OK with gauge wheels to carry the weight of the loader in float so the tines don't dig in too bad.

As for debris building up too much with the rake on the 3PH, I would just leave more piles for later pickup with the fork bucket/grapple.

 

[TedLaRue]

A couple of thoughts:

You can (probably) set the lift links on your 3pt hitch to allow the rake to float horizontally (i.e., so it has some degree of freedom to tilt left or right) so that the rake follows the contour of the ground. Your front end loader bucket doesn't do that. However, you could probably design a way to attach it to allow that kind of float, but it would be more complicated.

Secondly, the entire 3pt hitch can float up when it needs to. You may have a "float" position on your loader's control valve, but I'm not sure it would float smoothly because it is in front. Of course if you're moving very slowly, you could manually raise/lower the loader as needed.

Just some food for thought...



The

 

[Willl]

http://www.tractorbynet.com/photos/showphoto.php/photo/1609/size/big/sort/1/cat/529

 

[jkade72]

I mounted it today and used it for about four hours and it did just what I wanted it to do. A heck of a lot easier than behind the tractor.