Another Set of Homemade Pallet Forks

[gkh7890]

Hey all,

Thought I'd share my project/adventure. Being on a limited budget, I wanted a set of forks but didn't have $600+ to give. I must say that I was helped by a good friend who has a forklift service and repair business. I shared with him what I was looking for and he ended up giving me a set of 42" forks and the carriage off a forklift that was being scrapped. So, off to building my set of pallet forks I went.

Here is what I had to work with and as you can see, in the end, I have a functional set of pallet forks.

PLEASE keep in mind that I don't have a metal shop and used the tools I had at hand (or acquired inexpensively).

I cut off the vertical supports from the carriage. One interesting point here is that the total width of these are 35" whereas a regular Q/A pallet fork is 45" wide. With this, I decided to fabricate a frame to attach the carriage to and that was wide enough for my quick attach. Thus, I used 2"X3"X3/16" tube steel. I opted to go this route VS a Q/A Mount plate b/c of (1) cost & (2) I hope to adapt it to a 3-point hitch as well. I'm just at $100 - $125 in out-of-pocket costs.

I had some metal snow plow blades (another free resource) so I cut that up and used that material to make the quick attach mount.

Once that was done, then I welded the carriage to the frame, tested it and then prime and paint. As for the welding....this was my FIRST project and I know the welds look crappy but they're working! (I know some will want to critique the welds and that okay so long as you know I'm a novice). I did spend a lot of time reading on the welding forum here and I will tell you that if you have a HF welder (it did just fine for me), go get some "American" flux core wire and don't use the HF material. Difference B/W night and day!!!! I switched out to Lincoln Electric wire and what a difference!!!! While not shown in the photo, the top bar of the Q/A has 4 angled supports across it (I basically copied the design of my bucket).

Anyhow, I need to add a frame on the side and top so materials won't fall back but the main purpose of the forks were to lift our 330 gallon plastic tote to carry about 175/200 gallons of water thru the yard to water a dozen trees. Since then, I just used them at my father-n-law's place to help clean out a fence line and WOW.....the debris and crap I picked up using them!!!! I like them so much, I'm now contemplating adding a "claw" on the top and make a grapple out of it??? If I do that, I'll make it so I can remove them and have 2 attachments in one. They are so handy, I'm sure I'll find more uses for them as projects come up??!!

Well, enough of my blabbering.....hope you like it, I'm pretty pleased with my efforts. To all who have done this before, thank you for sharing your projects b/c you provided the inspiration to try this!

Thanks,
Greg

P.S. Here's some work photos too

[Farmerford]

Looks good to me. I did sort of the same thing for a John deere 455D crawler loader a few years back and they get much more use than I imagined.

Nice looking place you have, too!

[gkh7890]

Thanks FarmerFord!

The place is actually my Father-n-law's. We're getting it ready for a couple of calves for meat cows as soon as we can get the fence installed and find some calves.

[J_J]

Nice work, very strong, and you saved lots of bucks.

I did something very similar for my Power-Trac. I must have about 6 sets of forks now, some with a 1 in hole in the end for a 2 in ball for moving trailers. Another fork, I installed a cyl and bucket for a short hoe on the front. I built the items in the first two pictures.

The grapple in the last picture, you slide it on the carriage and then slide the other fork on.

[gkh7890]

Thanks for the ideas J.J.

[Wolfy]

Got to hand it to you J J. Your designs are one of a kind. For sure we need more people who think outside the box.