I purchased a hydraulic Tree Shear for my tractor from Titan equipment. It does a great job shearing off Autumn Olive bushes and small saplings. However, after a few minutes of shearing, I need to grapple the brush out of the way in order to go deeper into the woods. After several swaps between the grapple and shear, I decided to try to build a skidsteer interface that would attach to my 3pt hookup on the rear and leave the grapple on the front.
I started with 46"x15-5/8" x 1/2" steel plate. I thought about going with thinner plate, but the shear's stated weight is 950 Lbs. I got the plate home and did some fiddling around and determined (by dumb luck) that a 5/8" x 3" piece of plate steel sitting on top of the plate would slide very nicely through the slots in the implement. I also had laying around some 4" "C" channel. This "C" channel formed a loose-fitting guide for the skidsteer latches to slide up and down.
I drilled 1/2" holes through the "C" channel and 5/8" plate. I welded a 3/4" 'guide' nut onto the 5/8" plate and 1/2" nut on top of the "C" channel. I screw 1/2 x 3" bolts through the top nut down onto the plate to hold it into plate.
This completed the 'skidsteer' part of the interface. All that I needed then was to add the 3-pt part. I already some 6x6x1/4" steel plates with 3pt pins from a previous project. I had to build out about 2" a post for the top link to fasten to. I used some scrap square tube. I'm using a log chain for the top link -- as it has to be 33" long to reach out to the interface.
Attached are some photos showing some of the parts and final assembly.
There are a lot of forces working on my welds -- so far (fingers-crossed) nothing has broken loose. There's room for more reinforcement if it becomes necessary.
I started with 46"x15-5/8" x 1/2" steel plate. I thought about going with thinner plate, but the shear's stated weight is 950 Lbs. I got the plate home and did some fiddling around and determined (by dumb luck) that a 5/8" x 3" piece of plate steel sitting on top of the plate would slide very nicely through the slots in the implement. I also had laying around some 4" "C" channel. This "C" channel formed a loose-fitting guide for the skidsteer latches to slide up and down.
I drilled 1/2" holes through the "C" channel and 5/8" plate. I welded a 3/4" 'guide' nut onto the 5/8" plate and 1/2" nut on top of the "C" channel. I screw 1/2 x 3" bolts through the top nut down onto the plate to hold it into plate.
This completed the 'skidsteer' part of the interface. All that I needed then was to add the 3-pt part. I already some 6x6x1/4" steel plates with 3pt pins from a previous project. I had to build out about 2" a post for the top link to fasten to. I used some scrap square tube. I'm using a log chain for the top link -- as it has to be 33" long to reach out to the interface.
Attached are some photos showing some of the parts and final assembly.
There are a lot of forces working on my welds -- so far (fingers-crossed) nothing has broken loose. There's room for more reinforcement if it becomes necessary.
