Help me design a leaf-collection bucket!

[beenthere]

Here is a vacuum system that may give you some ideas.

http://www.stonehams.com/hdmcs.html

I use a slightly smaller pull behind cart.

[davesisk]

Hey Folks:

Just to satisfy one of the questions, I called the local dealer and asked about running a small hydraulic motor off the tractor hydraulic system. The fellow in the shop I spoke to said it should be fine to do that.

I'm thinking that perhaps one of the Agri-Fab 46" lawn sweepers would be ideal to start with. I could likely mount it in the 48" bucket easily, and just drive it in a straight line. Sounds like a reasonable design/cost/build effort trade off. I could retrofit a hydraulic motor to it sometime in the future if it really seemed necessary.

Does anyone have one of these Agri-Fab lawn sweepers? How does it dump? I've never seen a pic of it dumped, so I don't know if I could dump it with it in the bucket. Any idears?

Thx!
Dave

[ksmmoto]

I have an Agri-Fab 46" lawn sweeper. It dumps by the fabric hopper flips up, has a rope tied on it to dump from the mowers seat.

Picks up leaves great, but the hopper fills way too quick. I made a plate for the mower's discharge that mulched the leaves. This worked well as I could cover about ten times more ground before the hopper was full. It does get heavy though!

Another method was to make a large pile close to the pickup area and rake the leaves on a tarp to tow them to the garden.

ksmmoto