Spring Rake Improvement ?

[Impulse]

Prior to purchasing my 425, it seemed there was quite a bit of mixed thoughts on the spring rake. I bought the rake anyway. Now maybe I don't know any better, but I LOVE the spring rake. Sticks, brush, grass, leaves, pine needles, you name it.

Even though the rake is pretty awesome, there are some negatives. When you purchase the rake, it is configured so that you have to pull the rake so the work is done in reverse. Now there's a benefit here in that you can throw it into float and get down to it. This works pretty good until the pile gets too big and then it will float right over the top.

The next negative is that if you are raking into a line, in order to consolidate that line into a pile, you have to drive over everything you raked. Luckily the PT is a mountain goat and it still works fairly well but if you have a lot of bigger sticks or what have you, that can become a bit of a chore (and a good chance a stick will work its way up through the drain hole by your feet and try to stab you).

So last week, I did SPRING RAKE 2.0, and I flipped all the springs around so that I could push. Now this also was nice for consolidating but I immediately missed being able to get right up to the edge of something and drag whatever mess out of there. Also, with pushing the float action is no longer an option because it immediately tries to dig in, regardless of the angle and you drive up on the rake.

This didn't last long, so onto SPRING RAKE 3.0. If you haven't seen the spring rake up close, it is made with pairs of double springs overlapping each other, giving even spacing. For 3.0 I alternated one in front, one in back (keeping the spring underneath the bar). This gives a fair amount of space between the directions but allows me to push or pull. The cost of this is that I have now doubled the distance between springs in each direction, but it still works out pretty well.

So I walked across the street to talk to my buddy who fixes the big ag equipment and presented my thought of the double-whammy for SPRING RAKE 4.0.

I made a not-to-anything mock up. Basically I want to duplicate the bar holding the springs with a gap in-between to access the bolts and to prevent the springs from getting entwined (which happened 4 times in a day of raking). This way I have full tines going in both directions. Any thoughts?

 

[cqaigy2]

Interesting thoughts on your rake. It looks like it would work pretty well in either direction.

One thing i've found, is with the configuration/geometry of our lift arms, they want to travel downward when pushing. I've seen that some of the PT snow plows have wheels on them to counter act the downward tendency. Possibly something like that would allow you to use the float function, you would possibly be able to manage some depth variations by using the tilt function.

 

[Impulse]

The wheels are a great idea, especially for pushing. That would work better than a float only because then you can really control how much it digs in.

I wonder if there is a way to mount the wheels on a hinge plate off to the side so they'll just flip to always be following behind the rake in the direction it is traveling. Put bumpers on the sides to keep the hinged wheels from becoming perpendicular to the rake bars to aid in direction changes and the clang sound.

I tried editing post from phone but it just deletes it.

 

[MossRoad]

Gauge wheels out in front of the rake and you can then push it.

 

[MossRoad]

Here's a link to some photos for ideas.

rake with gauge wheels - Google Search

 

[Impulse]

Put the gauge wheel supports on the outer ends of the rake on a pivot/pin/hinge and now we're talkin. Thanks Moss.

 

[woodlandfarms]

Here is my York Rake. It is a John Deere I bought for like $150. I just reversed the wheels on it. It is old, the wheels don't match, but it does a fantastic job on maintaining my road.

 

[Impulse]

Those tines are way different from the PT rake. This is the PT one.

 

[woodlandfarms]

I was wondering how your looked. Yours is probably a lot kinder to lawns than mine is. But yeah, if it were me I would put on wheels and put the tractor in float. I then would use the tilt mechanism to decide how "deep" I want the tines to go. It is how I run my york rake.