Productive Saturday
First thing Sat morning I ran up the road to help a friend move some 3pt equipment away from what has become the kids play area. A 3-bottom furrow plow, a 4' mower, and a grader blade. He offered up the blade if I could use it, and I decided I could.
I took it home and did some fixing on it. Put it back together with some new pins of the correct size to take the wobble out, and it seems good to go.
Saturday afternoon, I decided it was a good tome to fix the pallet fork frame. I cut off the lower ears, made some 1/2" plate triangle pieces to mount the ears to, and then welded it all back up, using the tractor side of the QA for a jig. Sounds easy, but it was a lot of work! Brushed on some more red, and called it done.
If you look closely, you can see where the ears originally were. I cut them off with my Eastwood Versa-Cut 40 Plasma cutter. 3/4" is definitely as much as it'll handle... Now that I'm looking at the picture, I notice that you can see my three favorite tools, all laid out: Hobart 190 welder, Harbor Freight porta-band, and my plasma cutter.
Played with the pallet forks cleaning up some brush. It works pretty well for scooping up old piles and moving them together for a big burn. Also does fairly good plucking Tamarisk bushes out of the ground too.
Hopefully next week we'll hear from the bank that we can schedule closing, and get this mess up to the property soon to start working before it gets cold...
I'm busy this week, but come next weekend, it's going to be full tilt trailer-making time!
I'll work on the model some this week for a cut list, but here's a sketch I did a while ago to get an idea of the proportions. 28'x102" deck, pierced beam cross bars, drive-over fenders will stick up 3-1/2" above the deck. (I wanted to be able to set a shipping container on it, so this way I can use a few 4x4's and it won't squash the fenders.)