Let me once again gripe about the fact that I can't just run out and look at my tractor and box blade to see what I actually have. /w3tcompact/icons/frown.gif
First of all -- Bird, I remember you said my box
looked like yours, even though mine is a Howse, but mine does indeed have a hinged rear blade (see attached picture).
Since I have about as few hours on my tractor as anybody, it would probably be okay to ignore anything I say here, but I
have used my box blade enough to have
some feel for what it does. Having said that, I'm starting to think I
do have some misconceptions about what the rear blade is doing.
When I'm dragging the box, I can clearly see the front blade at work, and I still maintain that shortening the toplink causes it to dig in and take a serious bite. When the link is lengthened, I can also see that the front blade is
not engaging the soil at ground level. That's just what my eyeballs are telling me.
The rear blade, however, is not visible from the seat, so I guess I formed a mental picture of what it must be doing, and that's where I may have misconceived. I
thought the hinged blade had a limited travel, so that it only swung back so far and then hit some kind of stop. That would have made it possible to float the box on the rear blade. Looking at my own picture, I don't see any such stop, so it must be free to swing as far as it wants to, so Rob is right to question my "floating on the hinged blade" theory. /w3tcompact/icons/blush.gif
I'm not aware of any way to "pin" the rear blade, as George and Bill have mentioned, so I have to assume that there's something useful to be accomplished by a free-swinging blade. It occurs to me that I do monkey quite a bit with the position control when I'm trying to do anything close to finish work. So far, in fact, my "finish" work has been pretty lame. /w3tcompact/icons/tongue.gif The story I'm telling my wife is that it won't ever work right until I get a tip 'n' tilt setup. /w3tcompact/icons/wink.gif
I bought my box blade new, and despite the label saying, "Read the operator's manual before using", it came with no such manual. Time for a phone call. If any of you were fortunate enough to receive a manual with yours, perhaps there's some useful info on how to use these suckers?