looks like you need rear ballest. box blade for weight example extra weight on the box blade. and put box blade on ground. to help stabilize the tractor some. granted front end will bounce some. but perhaps not as much. and give you some better stabilty when on a hill. and working the driver.
i am with others moving controls back away.
from watching video. it looks like you could make generic hinges. out of say 6" or 8" pipe. that you can open close with a hand pull pin to lock them.
or perhaps welding a chain to one side and a hook on other. so you can just swing the chain around the post and hook it. with some slack in it.
car rim cut in half and each half welded to create a grove / hole pipe fits into.
flat bars with groves idea (see diagram/picture)
at moment i could see end of pipe jumping out and do some serious damage to ya. or pipe bending and knuckling ya as it jumps out and away. seen it happen a few times. i tend to use the backhoe myself. i will put a larger size end that slips over top of post. then push the ground rod, t post or like down into the ground, by using the backhoe bucket. and i know them posts can do some pretty good jumping and flying around.
but i have never seen a post driver up front and personal so the ideas for locking post in spot may be pretty far out there. or at least keeping the post were it should be and not some place else completely.
Hey, Boggen, thanks for the reply. Especially thank you for the time you took to make the diagrams.
Those are some good ideas. I had thought about the chain but not the other ideas. One problem I have (besides the fact that I'm not a professional engineer and have to kind of eyeball things with just whatever sense I have) is that the rail the thing runs on is only 9 feet tall. Since I designed it to drive posts about 2 feet into the ground I figured I needed about 4 feet of travel on the anvil, 2 feet of speed build up at the beginning to hit the post, and then a full 2 feet of driving distance to put the pipe in the ground without having to adjust/move the driver. When I quadrupled the line, though, it gave me about 54" of travel, plus the 31" or so the anvil is tall, plus the overhead of the pulley at the top and the wire clamps. Now the anvil comes to rest at the bottom of the beam, only about 5 inches from the end, and that restriction is only because I welded on a cleat of 4" channel to act as a failsafe stop in case the wire breaks so I don't have to leave the darned anvil wherever it is when/if the wire breaks.
So, I don't have much rail at the bottom on which to attach a retainer, and up above, where you put the red circles, would get hit by the anvil.
Still...I'm thinking now. You're right, if that pipe buckles, I'm going to be hosed. I'll grant that the pipe is about 0.250 wall...so it's pretty ridgid...but still.
My first thought is to do the chain and weld a series of two or three of them at different places vertically along the back of the rail. Then I could string them around the driven pipe back to the other side of the rail and disconnect them as the pipe goes in the ground, one at a time, as the anvil has to travel further down the rail.
In hindsight, I wish the rail was about 12 feet long, then I could have 3' of rail that could be used for a clamp like you've drawn to hold the pipe. Or the locking bars, either one.
I have the backhoe on the tractor...not really shown in the video, I don't think. It gives me some weight and it's a PITA to take it off. I do have a
ballast box (shown in the main album on my photobucket page, before I added about 500 pounds of scrap RR steel to it) but taking the BH off is a pill so I usually leave it on. But...I could drop the outriggers on the BH...I didn't think of that. That would reduce the bounce I get from the big rear tires. I'll try that, thank you, I hadn't thought of that before.
Thank you again.
Oh, and I see in your sig line you have a 555. Man, I got to use one a couple of times (and my father-in-law, four hours away from me has one). I love those things.
--HC