This past winter a friend hooked me up with a fab shop where he used to work as a source for reasonably priced steel. While we were over there picking up some 10" c-channel I bought from them for a dump wagon I'm building I noticed they were cleaning the place up and had a large dumpster out back that they were tossing alot of drops and scrap in so I asked the manager if it would be ok to go dumpster diving for anything we might find useful. He said "Sure, go ahead." We wound up picking up around 750 lbs or so of steel of varoius shapes and sizes - pipe, box, plate, angle, etc.
One of the pieces was an 81" piece of 4" x 1/4" angle. I thought this would be a good piece to make a landscape rake with. So using the drill press I drilled eighty 3/8" holes in it on 2" centers to mount the rake tines, which were sourced from Agri-Supply.
In talking to another
TBN'er about constructing this, he mentioned to me that this size angle is what Woods uses for their landscape rakes (at least the lighter-duty ones) and that he had recently worked on a friend's Woods rake that had gotten bent up pretty good, straightening it out. As a solution to that I decided that I would try and make mine a little less prone to bending. The difficulty was doing so and still having access to the bolts for the tines. What I did was using short sections of 4" angle to reinforce the backside of the angle the tines mounted on, making the angle a box tube in spots. While that beefed up the spots where the additional angle was welded on (and gave me a place to attach a set of gauge wheels), it didn't do anything for the spots where it wasn't, so I took some smaller angle and used that to span the open sections between the boxes. The image quality isn't the greatest but here's a picture with the 4" angle welded on and four of the eight "spanners" welded on.
80\" Landscape Rake 
Linear Mode
