Land plane/ grading scraper

[catdozer]

Your welcome.
Well I stole alot of ideas from others here on TBN.
Keep in mind the ones made from scrap or material on hand like catdozers will work just as well as ones made from new steel and painted up.

I too stole many ideas on here. The only scrap I used was my blades as which were given to me and my lower hitch angle iron. The rest came from a large steel pile that was given away as the plant was closing in Chicago, and that was close to 18 years ago when steel wasn't worth anything. Heres a picture of when I picked up the steel for my project. A homemade landplane will last longer than a purchased, since you know how well it was built.

 

[RDrancher]

Your welcome.
Well I stole alot of ideas from others here on TBN.
Keep in mind the ones made from scrap or material on hand like catdozers will work just as well as ones made from new steel and painted up.

I have a guy that has a bunch of iron selling out a few miles down the road. I'll have to check out what he's got. A combination of yours and the one that jenkinsph has will work out just fine. Mine has to look good since it'll be out on the job.

 

[crazyal]

Has anyone thought about welding a Lolly column or two across a grader for extra weight?

 

[MtnViewRanch]

Has anyone thought about welding a Lolly column or two across a grader for extra weight?

If the implement is built with the proper thickness of metal, there is no reason or need to add weight. Typically when a light weight implement has weight added to it because it is not heavy enough, then the implement ends up failing. There is not enough strength in the original structure to withstand the forces put on it due to the additional non structural weight that was added.

A perfect example is an 8 foot wide box blade that weighs 600lbs. A person buys this and figures out that it just isn't going to do what he wants it to do, it just floats over everything. So he looks and finds out that a good BB that size should weigh at least 1400lbs if not 1600lbs. So he adds 800lbs of who knows what to get the box up to the proper weight so that it will actually do some work. It doesn't take long before the metal starts bending and the welds start ripping out. It's not that the box was actually bad, just that it was never designed to do the heavy work of a box blade that is actually built heavy and intended to do hard heavy type work.

Point being, don't bother adding weight unless that weight actually adds to the strength of the implement.

Just my :2cents: learned the hard costly way.

 

[Kioti Tom]

If you want to see a land plane in use to see how it does, Everything Attachments has a video they made using it on a neighbors drive. It may answer some questions you have.

 

[JeremyWI]

Gordon,
I am new to this forum, but I am looking to build a grader very much like yours. My question is how far did you extend the cutting edges from the bottom of the grader? Did you mount them to angle iron and at about what angle?

 

[Gordon Gould]

Gordon,
I am new to this forum, but I am looking to build a grader very much like yours. My question is how far did you extend the cutting edges from the bottom of the grader? Did you mount them to angle iron and at about what angle?

Welcome to TBN Jeremy.
Take a look at the first picture back in post #10 on page one of this thread. It show how the cutting edges are mounted and should help you. The blades are mounted on 4" X 4" X 3/8" angle iron which would put them at about 45* and I set them 3/4" below the runners. I am not sure if this is the best way. It is just how I did it because I didn't know any better. Hope that helps.

 

[JeremyWI]

Gordon,
Thank you for the reply. This helps very much. Going to start on mine this week.

 

[jenkinsph]

Gordon,
Thank you for the reply. This helps very much. Going to start on mine this week.

Hope to build a new small one this week too. The wind has been blowing to hard for me to weld outside.

When I built this larger 8' landplane in 2009 I built it with the blades flush with the wear strips. Seems to work very well and you can easily load it up with dirt or gravel. Something to consider is setting the blades lower maybe a full inch and having a wear strip with wood shims between them and the frame for spacing the blade off the ground. This would allow you to dig deeper when remixing the gravel and fines on a driveway. When you wan't to finish grade as in the last two pics you could add the shims to make the blades flush with the skids.

 

[woodlandfarms]

So, here is my dilemma. Is pulling a land plane comparable to pulling a box blade or easier. I ask because I am serious about building one but my tractor is super wide but can really only move a 60 inch box blade. I wanted to make at least a 72 if not an 84.